1986 — The Night Lake Nyos Exhaled Death

On the night of August 21, 1986, Cameroon's Lake Nyos silently released a cloud of carbon dioxide that flowed downhill and suffocated 1,746 people in their sleep, up to 25 kilometers away. There was no explosion to warn the villages below — only a deadly gas moving quietly through the night.

It was one of only two limnic eruptions ever recorded, a disaster with almost no equal in nature. Scientists later installed degassing pipes in the lake to bleed off the gas and prevent another release. But Nyos remains Africa's strangest natural disaster, remembered for its silence as much as its scale.