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Messenger birds and poisonous exhalations
On September 21–22 in Pen Pal, Kaya first started using her crow Sumi to carry messages. Although crows are messenger birds in many mythologies, they're not actually used as couriers in real life, not regularly anyway--pigeons are. People all over the world enjoy keeping homing pigeons (including in my town: I got a tour of a dovecote some years back--picture here); pigeons were used to deliver mail in India into the 2000s; and China still keeps military homing pigeons as a safeguard in the event that twenty-first-century communications are disabled for some reason (see Malcolm Moore, "China Trains Army of Messenger Pigeons," Telegraph, March 2, 2011.)
(Image source: Morgan Banaszek, "12 Facts about China You Probably Didn't Know,", Project Pengyou.)
On September 28 in Pen Pal, a bubble of carbon dioxide rises from a lake in Kaya's country, with disastrous consequences. In real life, this happened most dramatically in Cameroon's Lake Nyos in 1986. Lake Nyos is a crater lake, into which carbon dioxide slowly seeps from a pocket of magma. On August 21, the weight of water on top of the accumulating carbon dioxide was no longer enough to keep it down: it bubbled up and out, and because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, it settled on the surrounding land, suffocating approximately 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock. A similar, less devastating event had occurred two years earlier at another lake in Cameroon, Lake Monoun. The only other lake known to be at risk of this is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but all that's required for it to be possible is a lake above a volcanic fissure.
The eruption of carbon dioxide at Lake Nyos was accompanied by a rise in dissolved iron to the lake's surface, turning it rusty red:
[image no longer available]
Accumulations of carbon dioxide in mines are one of four sorts of killing "damps" (from the German dampf, meaning "vapor"--they're "choke damp" (also called "stythe damp"). The other sorts are "white damp" (carbon monoxide), "fire damp" (methane or other flammable gasses), and "stink damp" (hydrogen sulfide).
(Image source: Morgan Banaszek, "12 Facts about China You Probably Didn't Know,", Project Pengyou.)
On September 28 in Pen Pal, a bubble of carbon dioxide rises from a lake in Kaya's country, with disastrous consequences. In real life, this happened most dramatically in Cameroon's Lake Nyos in 1986. Lake Nyos is a crater lake, into which carbon dioxide slowly seeps from a pocket of magma. On August 21, the weight of water on top of the accumulating carbon dioxide was no longer enough to keep it down: it bubbled up and out, and because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, it settled on the surrounding land, suffocating approximately 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock. A similar, less devastating event had occurred two years earlier at another lake in Cameroon, Lake Monoun. The only other lake known to be at risk of this is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but all that's required for it to be possible is a lake above a volcanic fissure.
The eruption of carbon dioxide at Lake Nyos was accompanied by a rise in dissolved iron to the lake's surface, turning it rusty red:
[image no longer available]
Accumulations of carbon dioxide in mines are one of four sorts of killing "damps" (from the German dampf, meaning "vapor"--they're "choke damp" (also called "stythe damp"). The other sorts are "white damp" (carbon monoxide), "fire damp" (methane or other flammable gasses), and "stink damp" (hydrogen sulfide).
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I wonder if it would be possible to put a monitoring system in the lakes.
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I read about the events in Cameroon, where one day, whole villages were found to have been gassed by the vapors from the lake during their sleep. The vapors lingered in low spots in the terrain, and people might be walking along fine, unknowing that the CO2 was up to their wastes, until their children dropped unconscious, or they themselves entered a lower spot in the terrain where they would find themselves blacking out as they descended into areas where the CO2 was higher than their head level. They were walking along, and then suddenly passing out and dying where they fell, to be found later by friends, who would realize that they themselves were suddenly in deep trouble.
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In my mind, the event is linked with the poison-gas disaster in Bophal, but of course the latter was manmade.
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On Dolphins in general there's a sort of splitting that occurs among the bipeds with opposable thumbs that has Dolphins as the sweet playmates of the sea who will help a sailor in distress as opposed to Sharks who are primaeval killers preying on the living like the undead. If they stop moving they die. But apparently they are just what they are. Dolphins will drown a baby dolphin if they want get some action with its mother. And Sharks are quite shy creatures whether they like humans or not they tend to leave them alone. They couldn't eat a whole one.
I don't think you understand how suicide bombing works unless there's some irish in you. They'd strap the bombs to some other guy take his family hostage and explain we all gonna die. You can die and save your family or you can refuse to drive this lorry into that checkpoint and then everyone you care about dies too. I'm with Chomsky on this one. Too complicated to explain to a dolphin just keep it as need to know.
But if you truly care about black people dying in Africa not gonna mock that. Angels may have a sense of humour but they've never taken to mine.
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Yep, a very dangerous job.
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I remember reading about that in middle school. Being killed by something you can neither see nor escape was and is a particular horror of mine, so you can imagine how well that went over with younger, less defense-equipped me.
I never found a way to work them into my Váli story, but the "Mist Troubles" (Móðuharðindin) following the 1783 eruption of Laki are one of the scariest consequences of volcanic activity I've ever heard of.
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