Degassing
The scale of the disaster led to much study on how a recurrence could be prevented. Estimates of the rate of carbon dioxide entering the lake suggested that outgassings could occur every 10–30 years, though a recent study shows that release of water from the lake, caused by erosion of the natural barrier that keeps in the lake's water, could in turn reduce pressure on the lake's carbon dioxide and cause a gas escape much sooner.
Several researchers independently proposed the installation of degassing columns from rafts in the lake. The principle is simple: a pump lifts water from the bottom of the lake, heavily saturated with CO, until the loss of pressure begins releasing the gas from the diphasic fluid and thus makes the process self-powered. In 1992 at Monoun, and in 1995 at Nyos, a French team directed by Michael Halbwachs demonstrated the feasibility of this approach. In 2001, the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance funded a permanent installation at Nyos.
In 2011 two additional pipes were installed by Michael Halbwachs and his french-cameroon team to assure the complete degassing of Lake Nyos.
Following the Lake Nyos tragedy, scientists investigated other African lakes to see if a similar phenomenon could happen elsewhere. Lake Kivu in Democratic Republic of Congo, 2,000 times larger than Lake Nyos, was also found to be supersaturated, and geologists found evidence for outgassing events around the lake about every thousand years. The eruption of nearby Mount Nyiragongo in 2002 sent lava flowing into the lake, raising fears that a gas eruption could be triggered, but fortunately it was not, as the flow of lava stopped well before it got near the bottom layers of the lake where the gas is maintained in solution by the water pressure.
Read more about this topic: Lake Nyos, The 1986 Disaster