Lake Nyos in Cameroon, a crater lake, is known as an 'exploding lake' due to its rare limnic eruptions. On August 21, 1986, it released a massive cloud of suffocating carbon dioxide, killing nearly 1, ...

Over months and years, however, the researchers uncovered a monstrous, far more insidious geologic disaster—one thought to exist only in myth. Even worse, they realized, the catastrophe could recur, ...