Constraints on the age of Lake Nyos, Cameroon

Abstract

The upper 40m of Lake Nyos are retained by a weak natural dam which, if it were to fail, would not only devastate the area hit by the 1986 gas disaster but would also cause a serious flood to surge down the Katsina Ala into Nigeria. The age of the pyroclastic cone, of which the dam is the last remnant, is therefore of great practical importance to the people of the area. If the pyroclastic cone is only a few hundred years old, as some have suggested, then it is eroding away quickly and the dam must surely fail in the very near future. If, on the other hand, it is many thousands of years old, then there is less immediate cause for concern.The age of the pyroclastic cone can be constrained in three ways:(1) Two samples of basalt, one from the dam itself and one from a lava flow which post-dates the pyroclastic cone, have both yielded K–Ar ages in excess of 100,000years.(2) Photographic evidence indicates that there has been no detectable change (>2m) to the width of the dam since 1958. This constrains the average erosion rate and suggests that the pyroclastic cone is at least 4000years old.(3) Cores from sediment deposited after the level of a small lake to the northeast of Lake Nyos was raised by a debris slide from the pyroclastic cone, contain no volcanic ash. A sample from the base of this sequence has yielded a radiocarbon age of 2700years.The Lake Nyos dam must therefore be, at the very least, a few thousand years old and although its general stability must give serious cause for concern there is no reason to suspect that the rate at which it is currently eroding away is of itself sufficient to pose an immediate threat.