Ep. 55: Fade to Black

On the night of August 21, 1986, the villages around Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon went quiet. There was no fire, no flood, and no sign of a struggle. By morning, more than 1,700 people and thousands of animals were dead, some of them miles from the water. The few who woke up found that their neighbors, their families, and even the insects were gone.

This week, Andrea takes us to a remote crater lake that had been keeping a deadly secret for centuries. What rolled through those valleys in the dark? Why did some people survive while the person lying next to them did not? And how did scientists piece together a kind of disaster that almost no one believed was possible?

We dig into the science of what happened at Lake Nyos, what it does to the human body, the strange injuries survivors woke up with, and the unsettling question of whether it could happen again.