These are the teaching notes for a case study in which students are presented with data on a particular lake that they must synthesize in order to determine the cause of an event that occurred in 1986 in Cameroon, Africa. The case centers on Cameroon's Lake Nyos, a volcanic lake which released a large quantity of carbon dioxide gas, killing over 1700 people, livestock, and wildlife in the area. The case can be used in a limnology or an aquatic biology course and was intended to introduce and reinforce the concepts of thermal stratification and use students' curiosity about this event to get them to think about how layers of water develop. The case could also be extended to cover or review other concepts such as lake formation (in this case, volcanism as a lake-forming process) or gas solution (in this case, carbon dioxide solution). The case could also be used throughout a limnology course because it deals with many aspects of the subject: lake origins, thermal stratification, gases, water movements, and applied limnology (remediation of problems). Instructors can introduce the case early in a course and refer back to it when each new topic comes up. The case also allows students to synthesize different types of limnological data to solve a serious problem.
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