Dusted Files

On August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon exhaled a cloud of CO2 that rolled silently down into the valleys below and suffocated 1,746 people before morning. The lake itself looked almost unchanged. A fix has been installed. But Lake Kivu holds 2,000 times more gas, and two million people live on its shores.

On January 12, 1888, children left for school across the Dakota Territory in mild weather. By afternoon, the temperature had dropped 40 degrees in thirty minutes. 235 people died — many frozen within sight of shelter they never found. No warning had been issued.

In September 1859, a solar storm gave telegraph operators electric shocks from disconnected equipment. Some kept working — powered by the aurora alone. The same storm today would collapse the global power grid. In 2012, one of equal strength missed Earth by nine days.