Mother Nature Hates You

The 'Killer Lake' Powering Rwanda - BBC Click
This video is about Lake Kivu. It hasn't killed anybody yet, at least not in recorded history, which might not go back very far in this part of the world. But Lake Nyos is also in Africa, about 1500 miles west northwest in Cameroon. I remember hearing about Lake Nyos a while back. I should say I remember the incident, I didn't remember the name. Up until then I didn't think it was possible for a thousand people to die all at once without anyone even knowing anything was wrong and without there being any obvious evidence left behind. One minute everything's fine and an hour later everyone in town is dead. Of course, we live within a hundred miles of a couple of volcanoes, and if one of them decided to really blow their top, well, me and everyone else in Portland would be a memory. But one of those volcanoes had a pretty good blast not too long ago, so maybe that relieved some of the pressure in the magma down below. It did, didn't it?

But back to our lakes. There are a bunch of lakes that have two layers like this one. However, there are zillions of lakes, and straitifed lakes are relatively uncommon, so killer lakes are pretty rare.

The lake water is really weird. The upper layer is fresh and fine for most everything. The lower layer has a bunch of gases dissolved in it, which makes it denser and so prone to sit on the bottom. Dissolved means you have added something to a liquid and volume doesn't change. (Doesn't it? I did a little checking and it seems that the volume does change, but only by a very small amount compared to the change in weight.)

This reminds me of the fresh water lenses that appear on atolls in the South Pacific.

KivuWatt and Kivu 56 Power Stations

The KivuWatt Power Station is the one mentioned in the video, but there is another one under development, the Kivu 56 Project, about twenty miles to the North.

P.S. Spell-check could not fix 'releaved'. It did not suggest 'relieved', so some days I am still worth my salt.