The Killer Lake

Disaster struck swiftly and without warning. On August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon, a small nation on the west coast of Africa, snddenly belched a dense clond of carbon dioxide. Speeding down a river valley, the clond asphyxiated over 1700 people and many livestock. 

Deep waters in Lake Nyos are pumped to the surface to remove dissolved CO2 gas. 

3 The Liquid-Vapor Phase Equilibrium of a Solution Can Be Understood in Terms of the Entropy of Mixing and the Intermolecular Forces 

Sections 9.3 and 9.4 examine phase equilibrium in mixtures, focusing primarily on systems in which at least one of the coexisting phases is a liquid solution (i.e., vapor-liquid, liquid-liquid, and soUd-Uquid solution phase equilibrium). 

A liquid solution that is a mixture of two components, A and B, is called a binary liquid mixture (or binary solution). Like a single-component liquid, this solution will have a vapor pressure (P) that depends upon the temperature. For a binary solution, though, the vapor pressure will also depend upon the composition of the liquid, defined by the mole fractions ni and jcb, where the superscript 1 denotes the liquid phase. The composition of the vapor above a binary liquid mixture, denoted by xX and Xb (v for vapor ), will usually differ from that of the liquid. 

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The example of chicken breath was inspired by the article, From chicken breath to the killer lakes of Cameroon uniting seven interesting phenomena with a single chemical underpinning by Ron DeLorenzo, Journal of Chemical Education, 2001, 78(2), 191. The article also discusses boiler scale, the way that carbon dioxide partitions between hzzy drink and the supernatant gases (see p. 165), and stalactites and stalagmites. 

Chicken Breath to the Killer Lakes of Cameroon Uniting Seven Interesting Phenomena with a Single Chemical Underpinning," /. Chem. Educ., Vol. 78, 2001,191-194. 

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