volcanic farts.
sunday afternoon, erik and i curled up on the couch with some far-too-hippified veggie burgers (no, really - even i made a comment about the excessive organic grain presence) and a PBS documentary entitled "Volcanic Killers." dude, good times. although i'm slightly embarassed to say that my first thought was "volcanoes bore me."

the most striking segment of the documentary was on Lake Nyos. in 1986, an unfathomable and inexplicable disaster struck the unassuming villages surrounding Lake Nyos, a crater lake in Cameroon, Africa. dangerous gases had been building up in the lake, unbeknownst to the geologists and "volcanologists" (bwah) who had surveyed the waters about a year beforehand. something happened - i can't quite remember - maybe a small earthquake, but the gases were disturbed. basically, the lake let out a giant fart cloud of extremely dense carbon dioxide, killing close to 2,000 people and countless animals in the four surrounding villages.

perhaps the eeriest thing about the documentary, and the disaster in general, were the accounts of the survivors. the eye-witnesses. i'm fairly sure the survival percentage was in the single digits, but i have no idea. these people watched practically everything die around them... their entire families, their children, their entire communities, and even their cattle. i can't even fathom how the Six Feet Under characters, and Amber Atkins for that matter, deal with so many dead people - much less how someone can move on after watching everyone they knew literally drop dead. how can you ever be whole again?

the Lake Nyos disaster triggered extensive and paranoid testing of every single crater lake in the world. if there's one thing that freaks us humans out more than anything, it's something we can't explain. crews rushed out to Cameroon as soon as possible to start trying to figure out what happened, and why we didn't know it was going to happen before thousands died.

and now, we say "The science behind the disaster is fairly simple."