"On this episode of "Strange Science,"" "these mysterious stones have confounded scientists for centuries." "Cant his California geyser really predict earthquakes?" "Does the water at Lourdes have the power to miraculously heal the sick?" "Is this shack located in the center of a mysterious vortex?" "This African lake exploded, and 1,800 people died." "Ancestral temples, pagan arenas, or monumental landmarks." "Monolithic stone circles have stood throughout western Europe for over 5,000 years." "Still, archaeologists know little about these structures, or the people who built them, or why." "Were these strange wonders built by sorcerers and wizards, as many people thought over the centuries?" "It is written that the legendary Merlin the magician said," ""For in these stones is a mystery and a healing virtue against many ailments."" "These incredible stones loom on the landscape." "Were they cathedrals of now-forgotten ancestors?" "Since no ancient historians have written about them, superstitions and legends flourished over time." "Were they Egyptians, Greek, Roman, or, as many came to believe, were they erected by the Druids, the elite priestly caste of Celts that populated Britain as long as 2000 BC?" "Did the Druids make their sacrifices and practice their strange rituals amid these monolithic stones?" "Through the passage of time, little remains to help answer these questions." "Clues have been erased, stolen, and swept away with the passing centuries." "The strange thing is that because stone circles were notorious for having nothing in them at all, and they were just crude old stones, no archaeologist really had bothered about them." "Author of ten books on the subject," "Doctor Aubrey Burl is the world's leading stone circles expert." "We know so much more about stone circles now than we did even 25 years ago." "A myriad of small clues chip away at the secrets of the standing stones." "Human bones buried at the bottom of stone holes." "Carved chalkings of sexual organs, presumably for some cult of fertility." "Alignments to the sun or the moon." "Carvings on the stones." "So many different things emerge over the years, and they're still emerging." "At the forefront of preserving and deciphering the clues from Britain's prehistoric sites are the dedicated scientists at English Heritage." "In 1997, they made a remarkable discovery beneath the Great Stone Circle outside the village of Stanton Drew- a discovery that they hope will reveal some tantalizing new information." "Stanton Drew is one of Britain's largest and most complex monolithic sites, consisting of three stone circles on what is now a rolling sheep pasture." "Jutting up from the English countryside still stand dozens of the imposing prehistoric stones." "Archaeologist Andrew David was a member of the surveying team." "The story began with a request for us to do a routine geophysical survey." "This is something we do on archaeological sites across the country." "And we didn't expect anything particularly exciting to happen." "There are about 27 stones that we know of in the Great Circle at Stanton Drew." "Our experience of other sites suggests that perhaps there may have been features within the stone circle or nearby." "A team of English Heritage archaeologists, including Neil Linford, surveyed Stanton Drew with magnetometers- highly sensitive devices that can virtually see underground." "I'm walking now from the northeast, along the avenue marked by these two rows of stones to either side, which probably would have been the original entrance into the main monument." "And on the screen here is the result of the preliminary survey." "The first thing we were surprised to see was the presence of a very large encircling ditch, describing a circle around the existing stone circle." "Scientists in the 1920's discovered a similar henge ditch surrounding the stone circle at Avebury." "This enormous pit was originally excavated by prehistoric laborers, using tools from antlers." "But the discovery beneath Stanton Drew's Great Circle held even more significant surprises." "What is unusual about this site is that it joins the very few monuments which combine the henge structure, the ditched enclosure, with a stone circle." "It joins with Stonehenge and Avebury as being a major ceremonial complex." "We asked Doctor David if he thinks England's stone circle sites share any ritual or spiritual relationships." "I think there certainly is a general belief system which is common to all of these sites." "There are regional differences, very clear regional differences, for instance, in the architecture of stone circles." "However, there is a generality across the whole of the British Isles." "As the archaeologists working at Stanton Drew continued their survey, the data produced an astonishing discovery." "The first thing that we observed was a number of concentric arrangements of pits, nine in total, centered about a central magnetic anomaly, there." "This is the center of the circle." "And although there's nothing to see on the site today, we would have been in the middle of the nine concentric circles that formed the timber temple." "The archaeologists had discovered nine concentric rings, made form over 400 timber postholes." "Incredibly, a wooden temple must have stood at Stanton Drew, long before the arrival of the giant stones." "All we have as a result of the geophysical survey is a two-dimensional picture of the apparent foundations of a timber structure." "This is a watercolor reconstruction that graphically illustrates how complex and imposing such a structure may have been." "A roof may have been placed upon it, with perhaps a central unroofed area." "There seems to be a trend in later prehistory for timber structures such as this to be replaced by more permanent and durable lithic structures." "So the stone circle may be the latest and most enduring feature of the complex." "As some questions are answered, others are posed." "Just who were the people that built these complex structures, and how?" "It would be very nice if we could swap our magnetometers for a time machine for a day, just to have a look and see how these geophysical clues would relate to reality." "I imagine this would have been an extremely impressive monument." "It would have dominated the landscape and would have pulled people in from the entire surrounding area and would have been a real focus of ritual activity." "Archaeologists do not dig up pots, they dig up people." "5,000 years ago, people were putting up incredible structures." "Who feeds these people?" "What happens to the cattle?" "Where do they get 400 posts from without removing every tree from the forest around?" "The people we're talking about had no writing, didn't have representational art." "So all we have are the stones, the broken pottery, the bones of the people themselves." "It's all mute evidence, and we struggle with it." "Ancient myths, obscure legends, forgotten folklore, and generations of debate and speculation." "But buried beneath the stone circles are clues to the mystery- clues that now, some 5,000 years later, are just beginning to surface." "I know I'll never know the answer." "It's because we don't know that we keep on going at it." "After spending a lifetime facing mysteries as impenetrable as each massive stone," "Doctor Burl plans to interrogate the monolith builders directly, by taking his question with him to his grave." "I shall be created and scattered inside a stone circle." "And God knows what will happen, as the spirits say," ""What the hell are you doing here?"" "Coming up, is California's Old Faithful Geyser a key to predicting earthquakes?" "On "Strange Science."" "The boiling lava of an erupting volcano." "The treacherous winds of hail and rain that signal a tornado." "The downpour before a flood." "These signs allow people to reach shelter, and give authorities time to evacuate towns." "But the moments before one kind of disaster are relatively calm." "And they have a candidate who's very strong, and it's fighting with us for second place." "Earthquakes arrive unnoticed and the results can be devastating." "Though science cannot predict them, there have been claims that earthquakes have been foreseen." "Premonitions, electrical surges, and erratic animal behavior are among the many signs taken by some as foreshadowing a quake." "Yet these scenes of tragedy beg the question- how many lives could have been saved if only there had been some reliable warning?" "Thomas Heaton is a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology." "People call Heaton when they believe they've predicted an earthquake." "Well, the most common type of report from the general public is a dream, and a dream of something bad that's about to happen." "And I've personally received many such phone calls and since that time," "I've stopped paying attention to my own dreams." "But unusual methods have successfully predicted quakes." "In 1975 in China, a country with a long history of violent quakes and a commitment of trying to predict them, international scientists in the High Ching Province were struck by changes in radon gas in water levels." "These were followed by a series of smaller earthquakes, called foreshocks." "Even locals reported strange and erratic animal behavior." "Authorities weighed both anecdotal and scientific evidence and evacuated the area." "Within 24 hours, a 7.3 magnitude quake struck." "Thanks to the evacuation, there were relatively few casualties, despite the fact that 90 percent of the housing in the area collapsed." "Since earthquakes are a natural phenomenon, is it possible the earth sends us signs before they occur?" "This is the Old Faithful Geyser of Calistoga, California, located in the Napa Valley, two hours north of San Francisco." "It may look like a typical tourist attraction, but some scientists believe these towers of scalding water may be able to tell us something." "This geyser is special because it does forecast earthquakes, within a two- to 300-mile radius." "Olga Kolbek is an 83-year-old retired schoolteacher." "She has owned the Old Faithful Geyser for 25 years." "Well, I intended to make a health spa here and have good food and get into the mineral water and have doctors and attendants, but that did not materialize." "I've always like hot water, and I've been in hot water ever since." "Years ago, Olga noticed that Old Faithful wasn't always faithful." "The average time between eruptions is 40 minutes." "But in August, 1975, the interval extended to two and a half hours." "That evening, I listened to the news, and I found out we had an earthquake." "So the next morning again, I sat out there near the picnic table and again, it didn't erupt for two and a half hours." "And so I called the news media." "I asked them "Are we going to have an earthquake?"" "and they said "No."" "And that evening, I listened to the news and they said we had another earthquake around 1 0 o'clock, just as I was calling them." "So this geyser forecasted an earthquake before the news media knew about it." "The geyser's interval also increased before the Loma Prieta Quake that rocked San Francisco in 1989." "Since then, it has predicted several other quakes- some hundreds of miles away." "When it goes into a long interval, you know definitely we'll have an earthquake between two- or 300 miles." "I've been telling everybody this for 20 years, but I'm just a little retired schoolteacher and they don't listen to me." "For years, she was the only one who thought her geyser could predict earthquakes." "That is, until 1989, when geophysicist Paul Silver and his wife happened to visit the geyser as tourists." "We were talking with Olga Kolbek and she was telling us that the geyser predicts earthquakes and, you know, we said" ""Well, yeah, sure, that's great."" "But she said "We've been taking measurements of the interval between eruption for something like 20 years."" "Silver and his wife went through 20 years of Olga's logs." "Six months later, he calls me on the telephone, and he said "You know what?" "That geyser does correlate to earthquakes."" "People talk about serendipity all the time, but really, it is a really integral part of science." "And, but part of it is recognizing these chance occurrences for what they are and trying to go with them." "Silver linked a computer to an infrared sensor that monitors the eruptions 24 hours a day." "When the geyser erupts, the heat sets off the computer that's located in the gift shop." "Once a month, Olga's assistant modems the geyser's records to Silver's office at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C." "it's important to make the point that the Calistoga geyser is not a predictor of earthquakes." "We can think of this as a good lead in a court case." "It's not enough to convict, it's not enough to make the case, but it's suggestive of where we might be going, where we ought to make measurements, and how we might make measurements." "Right now, the geyser is a rough tool at best." "It seems to only be affected by large earthquakes, of a magnitude six or more." "Unfortunately, it is unable to indicate exactly where they will strike." "Old Faithful is situated in the center of what was once an active volcano." "Hot magma, deep in the Earth's crust, superheats the underground water until it jets out of the ground at 350 degrees, in a tower that often reaches 60 feet." "Because Old Faithful's water originates in conduits in underground rock, its eruption cycle may be disturbed when the strain on the rock is changed, as it was before the 1989 Loma Prieta quake." "Our interest in the Old Faithful geyser of California got started in 1989, right after the Loma Prieta earthquake." "The geyser has not responded to other earthquakes that occurred in California, but these are all much further away." "What we have done in the meantime is try to understand the geyser itself." "We regard this as an instrument that, in effect, is measuring strain in the Earth, and we've tried to see how it responds to other kinds of deformation, in particular tides and barometric pressure." "Silver hopes to one day install additional instruments around the geyser, to monitor the exact strain on the surrounding rock." "If the geyser could provide an early warning to scientists about impending earthquakes along California's deadliest fault lines, millions of people's lives could potentially be saved." "Scientists all over the world are working to decipher the complicated circumstances that lead up to an earthquake." "But time is running out." "In the next century, 40 percent of the world's population will be within 120 miles of active faults, where earthquakes are common." "Seismologist Thomas Heaton." "We get about 20,000 earthquakes a year in California." "Now, most of those 20,000 earthquakes are so small, we don't even feel them." "But the question is which of those 20,000 earthquakes is going to continue spreading on the fault until it becomes an important big earthquake?" "Well, I'd be happy to see people's lives saved, and I think this is very, very important." "Perhaps one day, unorthodox tools like this geyser could hold the key to deciphering the complex signs nature sends before an earthquake." "Next up, millions flock there seeking a cure." "We'll examine the miracle site of Lourdes, on "Strange Science."" "In the grotto beneath this massive cathedral, they stand silently- dozens of abandoned crutches and canes." "Soon, the trains and buses begin arriving." "Carried on stretchers, in wheelchairs, or under their own power, thousands come each day to this sacred site, each seeking a profound change in their lives." "For almost 1 50 years, Lourdes has been known as a place of miracles, a place of inexplicable medical occurrences, a place of healing." "It all began with 1 4-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, an illiterate peasant girl whose spiritual visions, or apparitions, would captivate the Christian world." "Father Liam Griffin is a Lourdes historian." "At the time of the apparitions in February of 1 858, her family were living in destitution in the Cachot." "They had run out of firewood to make the family meal." "And Bernadette came down around the area of the grotto, to gather wood." "She heard the sound of a gushing wind." "But as she looked up, she saw a lady dressed in white." "And thus began an amazing series of visions, 1 8 in all, that culminated in one of Catholicism's holiest places." "The famous spring of Lourdes was dug out by Bernadette on the 25th of February, 1 858." "She was asked by Our Lady to go to drink the water and to wash herself there." "And of course, naturally, Bernadette turned around towards the river, where she saw the water." "But the Lady pointed to the foot of the rock, inside the grotto, and Bernadette went to that point on her knees and scraped away at the ground." "Finally, a spring came up." "But the apparitions continued, and the mysterious lady requested that a chapel be built on the spot." "Father Peyramale, the local parish priest, was skeptical, and told Bernadette that if this lady wanted a chapel, she would have to identify herself." "On the 25th of March, 1 858, she said "I am the Immaculate Conception."" "Bernadette burst into the parish priest and said" ""She says she is the Immaculate Conception."" "And the parish priest said "Do you know what that means?"" "And Bernadette said "No."" "And it was from that moment on that the parish priest changed his attitude and became a supporter of Bernadette." "Almost immediately after Bernadette dug up the spring, local people began reporting miraculous healings from the waters." "Since 1 858, there have been 65 officially-declared miraculous cures, and over 5,000 unofficial cures." "The Medical Bureau at Lourdes was founded in 1 883, to scientifically examine these claims." "Doctor Patrick Thellier is the current President of the Bureau." "You have to understand that there are two parts of the process." "First, there is the acknowledgement, the authentication of the healing by the doctors." "And eventually, the second part, the recognition of a miracle by the Church." "The process is exhaustive and can take years." "Candidates must prove to the medical examining committee that they had grave, life-threatening illnesses that were cured instantaneously, totally, and definitively." "And the cure must be permanent." "And it is only at that time, and after a vote is taken, that the Committee will say if, indeed, a cure was extraordinary, and if we can then present this case to the Ecclesiastic authorities." "Determinations as to whether the candidate meets the religious criteria for recognition is made local bishop." "And he will proclaim to the world, on behalf of the Church, that a miraculous cure has occurred." "The 59th officially-recognized miraculous cure at Lourdes is Marie Bigot, who suffered from crippling meningitis." "When I arrived at Lourdes for the first time in 1952," "I was deaf, I was blind, and I was paralyzed entirely on my right side." "During her first pilgrimage, there was no change in her condition." "But when she returned in 1953, her paralysis suddenly abated." "On subsequent trips, her blindness and deafness were also spontaneously and completely healed." "All the doctors, the Germans, the Italians, the Americans, told me that it was medically un-curable, what I had." "Thousands of others have claimed to be cured at Lourdes, but their cases have not been officially recognized." "Sister Maryvonne Cochet is one of them." "There were periods when I was walking with a cane." "Other times, I needed to be in a wheelchair." "But the situation became more and more serious." "She was stricken with an extreme form of rheumatoid poly-arthritis, which spread through herjoints." "It took Sister Maryvonne almost 20 minutes, in torturous pain, to write these few sentences." "I couldn't even brush my hair, I couldn't eat." "I was completely dependent." "In 1988, the opportunity to go to Lourdes was given to her by a youth group, to celebrate her 25th year as a nun." "In 1988, when I was at Lourdes, in the middle of the religious ceremony, these hands, which were crippled and painful and deformed, came back to life." "And is it possible that Sister Maryvonne cured herself?" "." "It's not possible that my being cured is just psychological, because it would have happened a long time ago, since it's been for..." "it was so many years I was suffering." "It's a gift from God." "It certainly isn't the water." "Though pilgrims drink, bathe, and wash themselves with it, there's nothing unusual about the water from Bernadette's spring." "It has no medical properties." "It has been the subject of several comprehensive studies." "It is just normal, ordinary, pure spring water." "It is not the water of Lourdes itself that heals, but it is the faith of the people who use that water that helps them to be healed within themselves." "Nor did the water help Bernadette." "After she joined the convent at Nevers, her health declined, and she spent the final years of her life in agony, suffering from bone disease, aneurysms, tumors, and extreme asthma, finally dying at the age of 35." "But stories of miracles continued, and the call for canonization of Bernadette reached a peak in the early years of the 20th Century." "Part of that process is for the body to be exhumed for identification, and this was done the first time in 1909." "And her body was found to be totally intact at that time." "The body showed surprisingly little deterioration." "Organs and even veins were still intact." "So much so that upon her canonization in 1933," "Bernadette's corpse was moved to a glass casket for permanent display." "And so, the aged, the sick, and the infirm keep coming." "Of the hundreds of thousands who will make the pilgrimage to Lourdes each year, some will find nothing." "Others will find love, and perhaps hope." "And for a tiny percentage, there will be an inexplicable healing, something that can be examined by medical science, but whose ultimate source can never truly be determined." "Coming up, the Oregon Vortex- gravity-defying phenomenon or optical illusion?" "On "Strange Science."" "Nestled amid the tall pines and gentle streams of Southern Oregon lies a mystery as perplexing as a midday moon." "It is an area where the laws of physics seem to have gone haywire." "Where the laws of gravity defy Newton." "It is called the Oregon Vortex, home of the House of Mystery." "This area, which takes in about three-quarters of an acre, was known to the Indians way before White men came here." "Their horses would not come into the area, so the Indians called it "the forbidden grounds."" "Maria Cooper and her family have owned these grounds for nearly 40 years." "They bought the land from a Scottish physicist named John Lister, who came to America to study the strange phenomena taking place in the area." "Lister conducted some 1 4,000 experiments, and concluded that the land lay in a kind of weird magnetic anomaly- a place where gravitational and magnetic forces are distorted in bizarre manner, which he termed a vortex." "If Lister understood why all this was happening, he never told." "He burned his research notes before he died." "Now, the reason that we were told he burned them was that he didn't think people were ready for what was here." "For Cooper, the mystery has turned the Oregon Vortex into a bustling business, a must-see stop for curious tourists." "Our little crooked building here is the so-called House of Mystery." "It isn't really a house, it wasn't really built in this position, and it wasn't intended for this purpose at all." "It was actually built about 1 890, and it was used by the Gray Eagle Gold Mining Company as an assay office and then later a tool shed." "The Vortex's main attraction is this lopsided shack." "According to local legend, a heavy rain caused the building to slip off its foundation and slide several feet downhill, into a maple tree." "Ready to go inside?" "Folks, just step right up the front steps here." "Please grab the rail right there." "Okay." "Inside, everything is crooked." "Every wall, every angle is slanted, distorting one's perception about what is up, what is down, and what is straight." "A broom balanced on the floor seems to lean towards the north, rather than stand perpendicular." "All right, what we're looking at here is a platform that I'm pretty sure we can all agree is downhill over there and uphill over here." "Well, if this is true, I should be able to roll this ball down there, and it should stay down there." "Balls roll uphill." "Hey, did you do that?" "And so do bottles." "So why did it come back?" "The bottle is not actually rolling uphill, it's rolling downhill, it just looks strange." "We're standing south and north of each other, so the north end looks lower, but in fact, it's actually about, oh, three or four inches higher up where you're standing." "Can I get you?" "Yes, go ahead, stand right over there." "Now, this is level, but this shows such an extreme in the change of height." "Notice where we compare in height." "Do you all see that?" "Now, we're going to trade places, and as I change my end..." "Cooper admits that the weird anomalies in the house are just optical illusions created by the slanting lines." "But she insists there is some mysterious force operating in the area." "Cooper claims the vortex can actually transform the size of a human body." "And the only way that you can measure it, physically measure it, is with a camera, because whatever instruments you use change inside this affected area, just like you do." "We put the phenomena to a controlled test." "Two poles on either side of a plank are measured and found to be identical in size." "The plank itself is found to be level." "We set our camera at an equal distance from the poles." "We then compared two people, one short and the other taller." "Despite Cooper's claims, outside the House of Mystery, the illusion disappeared, and the height differences between our two subjects did not seem to increase as they switched sides." "This aeromagnetic map shows the Earth's magnetic field and the geomagnetic anomalies occurring throughout the United States." "Magnetic anomalies are usually caused by iron deposits, volcanic material, or some geologic that even affects the Earth's crust." "Doctor Joe Kirschvink, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, says there is something unusual at the site of the Oregon House of Mystery, but it isn't anything mysterious." "There is a magnetic anomaly at the stated position, but anybody with a magnetometer could pick that up." "Big deal." "If you look at the regional map, there are many such structures." "Why is that one unique and others not?" "Perhaps the Oregon Vortex isn't unique." "A few hundred miles south, in Santa Cruz, California, another shack has displayed similar phenomena for decades, as seen in this vintage TV program." "Remember this place?" "The Mystery Spot." "It's the eeriest place in the world." "Here's the house built on the mystery spot." "It's slipped downhill a bit." "But this ball doesn't go downhill." "It rolls up." "Some people theorize that a meteor from outer space buried itself at this very point- a meteor with magnetic properties unknown in ordinary metals." "Now, watch what happens here." "The attraction draws the body toward the other man." "It's almost impossible to push him back, perpendicular." "In fact, similar phenomena occur in over a dozen locations throughout Northern America, where coincidentally, a dozen shacks ha a dozen hills into a dozen trees." "Do vortexes exist at these locations as well?" "The term Lister used to describe the area is an anti-gravitational electromagnetic force." "It's a force coming from the center, pushing outwards, towards the extremities of the vortex." "Salvatore Trento is a writer and researcher who has traveled the country, measuring the magnetic levels of sacred sites used by ancient cultures." "At every sacred site or petroglyph site or stone circle site in the United States, there are these bizarre, strange, unusual geomagnetic fields." "Now, these are natural, but the people in the past located their structures on top of the aberrant fields." "And what I'm finding here is the same type of thing." "We asked Trento to being a magnetometer to measure the magnetic field surrounding the mystery house." "Just following the pathway of the reputed vortex," "I pretty much stay in the high numbers." "When I go outside the reputed vortex, I come back to more normal numbers." "I thinkjust from raw data, you can see there's a tremendous difference going on there." "These unusual magnetic patterns do affect people, according to Trento." "They won't change your height, but they could affect your mind." "The physiological literature on this is rather clear, from the 1980's." "Fields in some way affect people's neurotransmitters." "These are the chemicals that affect people's mood and behavior." "Things like serotonin, melatonin, dopamine." "There's a cascade or a flood of these neuro brain chemicals which apparently makes people feel differently." "Sort of like natural Prozac, if you will." "People may feel different, but Doctor Kirschvink downplays the effect the anomaly has on visitors to the House of Mystery." "There's nothing that you can see in the magnetic data for this area that suggests any type of a vortex." "There's just a nice little magnetic anomaly surrounded by a little moat." "That is not going to deflect gravity." "It is not going to produce optical illusions." "Geophysically, there is no basis for singling that particular place out separate from any others." "I don't know what makes this happen." "We're not here to convince people what happens here." "If you have a theory, it can be just as good as anybody else's." "Okay, if everyone will hold nice and still, we're going to balance the broom on the floor here." "A tilted shack filled with eager tourists." "A small magnetic anomaly on a scenic mountainside." "Let's try that again." "Although there is little connection between the two, the Oregon Mystery House remains an entertaining attraction whose optical illusions prove you can't always believe what you see." "Next up, the killer lake of Africa, on "Strange Science."" "Africa-timeless, yet modern." "Bountiful, yet barren." "Home to exotic animals, many of which are ferocious killers." "Among Africa's mix of danger and serenity is another deadly force." "Lake Nyos, known as "The Killer Lake."" "Lake Nyos may look inviting, but below its surface waits an invisible, silent, and scentless killer, an unusually high concentration of carbon dioxide gas." "Professor George Kling of the University of Michigan was a member of the scientific team that investigated this killer lake." "In 1986, Lake Nyos, in Cameroon, West Africa, released a tremendous amount of CO2 that killed about 1,800 people." "The Lake Nyos event took the scientific community by surprise." "Nothing like this had ever happened on record, and it was therefore extremely rare." "The rumblings in the lake began in the dark of night." "But it wasn't until the following morning that the awful truth emerged." "Happi Noel, from the nearby village of Bana, remembers it well." "Something happened in the village and a lot of people were scared and a lot of people were running away." "There was an emanation of natural gas from a lake and the gas was a killer gas." "According to Professor Kling and other scientists," "Lake Nyos had virtually exploded." "But how could a body of water actually erupt?" "What's happening in Lake Nyos is that CO2 charged springs are exiting into the bottom of the lake." "The lake is stratified, that is, the surface waters and the bottom waters don't mix." "So the CO2 can build up in the bottom waters to tremendous pressures." "The tremendously pressurized condition at Lake Nyos has a commonplace counterpart- an ordinary bottle of carbonated water." "When you look at a soda bottle, you don't see any gas bubbles, because the pressure from the cap is keeping them in solution." "The same situation exists at the bottom of Lake Nyos, where the upper surface waters act as a lid and keep the gas dissolved in the bottom waters." "And you can see, when you release the pressure, the gas comes out of solution." "Scientists don't know what triggered the explosion at Lake Nyos, but they have a theory about what it may have looked like." "When the gas bubbles left the lake, they would have exited with a tremendous velocity, at least 200 miles an hour, and depending on the conditions, perhaps up to supersonic speeds." "The energy associated with this gas release would have created a fountain thrown up into the air that would have over-topped the clock tower." "Although the experts offer a scientific explanation, local villagers were suspicious that the deaths at Nyos were the work of evil spirits." "The African believe there is nothing for nothing." "People are still very attached to their cultural and traditional ways of belief or doing things." "Although the explosion itself was huge, it was the emission of carbon dioxide gas that proved to be the silent killer at Nyos." "Normally, CO2 is not deadly." "However, in high concentration, it displaces oxygen in the air." "We continue breathing, but ultimately, we suffocate." "In this simple demonstration," "I've added some frozen CO2, dry ice, to water." "And the point that I want to illustrate is that the CO2 is actually more dense than air." "And so, in the Lake Nyos disaster, when the CO2 filled up inside the basin, it spilled over that spillway and actually ran downhill, through the river valleys." "So, you see that the CO is coming out and then going straight down and the moving on down, even flowing over the edge there." "Scientists estimate the Lake Nyos released one cubic kilometer of carbon dioxide gas." "For a visual reference, consider that the amount of ash released during the eruption of Mount Saint Helens was only one-third of a cubic kilometer." "This wave of oxygen-displacing gas rolled through the countryside, asphyxiating almost every living creature within a 24-kilometer radius, including 1,800 unsuspecting people in the village of Nyos." "The horrific disaster at Lake Nyos focuses attention on Cameroon, and relief came from all over the globe." "Members of the international scientific community gathered to investigate the phenomenon." "Professor Kling, who had worked in Cameroon previously, remembers his first visit back to the area." "It was an eerie feeling returning to the lake after the event." "The people that we knew, that helped guide us to the lake the first time, were gone." "The people in the villages that we stopped in and talked to were also gone." "These events were so rare and so strange that it really took a coming-together of very many disciplines within science to understand them and to try to solve them." "Scientists discovered the carbon dioxide-enriched springs were still emitting gas into the bottom water of Lake Nyos." "If not alleviated, Lake Nyos would explode again." "After much debate, the scientists settled on a test for a potential solution." "The plan involved sinking a giant pipe into the lake's pressurized bottom waters, which would release the trapped gas in a steady flow, allowing it to mix safely into the atmosphere." "The idea of degassing with the pipe is actually quite simple." "You put a pipe vertically down to the bottom of the lake, and with a pump at the surface, you start to bring water up toward the surface." "Now, as this water gets closer to the surface, the weight of the water above it, in the pipe, decreases." "Because that pressure is reduced, it's like taking the cap off of a soda bottle, the gas starts to come out of the solution inside the pipe." "When that happens, this gas-water mixture rises very rapidly toward the surface." "Once the fountain is established at the surface, you can remove the pump and the entire degassing process runs itself, without any external energy." "Led by French scientist Michel Halbwachs, the degassing team toiled beside Lake Nyos for four weeks, crafting a test pipe." "But would the technology actually work?" "Probably the hardest part of the degassing procedure is applying what works on paper and what works in our nice laboratories in a region that is in the middle of nowhere, in many senses." "The roads getting there are very poor, and things break in the field." "It rains, it's never exactly like you want it to be." "But with the help of many locals, the test pipe was in place and the pump motor was fired up." "And to the great relief of the scientists, their invention and creativity worked." "Whoo!" "Ho ho!" "Well, if I had the genie lamp and three wishes, the first wish would be, of course, that this disaster never occurred." "The second wish, I think, would be that we would be able to raise about a million dollars so that we could install, on a large scale, the pipes that are necessary for the degassing." "Once we have those pipes in place, they will essentially be self-cleaning for the lake, and there would be no worries for the people living around the lake of any future disasters." "While the degassing tests of Lake Nyos demonstrated a viable method of solving the problem, tragically, the solution is yet to be implemented." "The Cameroonian government has not allocated the money to fund the degassing project, and the springs continue feeding gas into the lake." "Currently, the pressure is higher than it was prior to the 1986 explosion." "Until the money is raised and the degassing pipes are in place, the killer lake of Cameroon is not tamed, it is merely sleeping, waiting to kill again."