From Bryan Lynas
“Can Cameroon’s lethal lake be made safe?” asks Tara Patel (This Week, 27 May). Of course: here are some cheap and safe ideas to get Lake Dyos to burp its deadly CO2 to order. The principle is simple enough. If everyone knows exactly when the lake will erupt, everyone can (and surely will) get the hell out of it. All we need is to trigger the release and to do that, the currently metastable system has to be destabilised. This should be very easy, using high explosives in one of the following ways.
Place explosive charges in part of the crater wall to simulate the sort of major landslip which apparently triggered the deadly 1986 gas release. Detonate remotely.
Drop naval depth charges from an aircraft, set to explode close to the lake floor.
Place high explosives with a pressure-activated detonator on a deliberately leaky craft (boat, raft) moored in some way over the deepest part of the lake (having noted how long it would take to sink) and retire.
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This is crude empiricism at its best. I would expect the explosives or landslide to upset the lake’s equilibrium, but if everyone has evacuated first, no harm will be done. Obviously the whole event should be monitored remotely to see just what does happen. If it works, all we have to do is to repeat this simple procedure every five years or so, depending on the gas build-up.
Cameroon should be able to afford this too.
