Solving the Mystery of the Killer Lake
 

Dear Steve,

Well, we made it to Africa. It's really beautiful here - much better than those National Geographic specials on PBS. My Dad only lost one bag during the flight but it was the one with the special camera lenses in it and he is in such a bad mood that we're all trying to avoid him as much as possible. My Mom says that the airline will find the bag and return it to him in the next couple of days but I doubt it. For one thing, airlines specialize in losing bags, not finding them. For another, we're in West Africa which is pretty rustic. It's not like we could give them a street address about where to find us or anything.

Right now we are in Cameroon near this big lake that I want to tell you about. It's a 'crater' lake so once upon a time it was a volcano. Now the volcano is dead and this huge lake lies in a crater with mountains surrounding it (Click here to see Cameroon on a map). One of the guides last night said this lake, called Lake Nyos, exploded in 1986 killing almost a whole village full of people and their cattle. I asked the guide what kind of chemical plants were dumping into the lake and he said there weren't any around here. Then I asked him if some terrorist group had blown the lake up but he said that there hadn't been any terrorists either. My Dad said he'd heard there was a volcano under the lake that caused the explosion but the guide said that was wrong too. Unfortunately the guide never got a chance to explain about what actually did happen because a snake crawled over Leah's foot right then and we forgot all about the exploding lake in the resulting hysteria. I swear my sister is such a hassle sometimes, I don't know what my parents were thinking when they had her.

Anyway, I know that we're going to have to do some huge project for Mr. Kresge's Biology class this year to compete in the science fair. Why don't we do this lake story? I'll take pictures and interview the locals and you can look up the stuff at the library. If we can get some stuff done on it now then we'll have more time to play softball this year. And you know Coach Jenkins said he'd kick you off the team if you didn't pull your grades up.

Let me know.

Lenny