Vesuvius, 79 AD
One of antiquity’s most famous natural disasters, Mount Vesuvius’ eruption around noon on August 24th, 79 AD, was one of Europe’s most powerful volcanic explosions. Vesuvius blew its top with a force 100,000 times greater than that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, and the eruption tossed deadly debris mixed with a cloud of poisonous gasses over 20 miles up into the air.
As it spewed gasses into the air, lava and hot pumice poured out of the volcano’s mouth at a rate of 1.5 million tons per second, racing down Vesuvius’ side to devastate the surrounding region and destroy nearby towns, of which Pompeii and Herculaneum are the best known.
Pliny the Younger, a Roman author and magistrate, was 15 miles away at Cape Misenum, visiting his uncle, Pliny the Elder – a Roman admiral who would lose his life during the course of rescue efforts. To Pliny’s detailed description of the events he saw and those told him by first-hand witnesses, comprising the best written and most thorough narrative of the event, history is deeply indebted.
There had been tremors for days, but they were not unusual. Then, around noon on August 24th, a cloud appeared atop Vesuvius, and about an hour later, the volcano erupted and ash began to fall on Pompeii, 6 miles away. By 2 PM, pumice, or volcanic debris, begin to fall with the ash, and by 5 PM sunlight had been completely blocked and roofs in Pompeii began collapsing under the accumulating weight of ash and pumice. Panicked townspeople rushed to the harbor seeking any ship that would take them away.
By midnight, the volcano was spewing a hot deadly column over 20 miles up into the air, while lava flowed down its side in six major surges as Vesuvius vomited molten rock in a rapid flow that incinerated all that it encountered. The lava did not reach Pompeii or Herculaneum, but it sent heat waves of more than 550 degrees Fahrenheit into those towns, turning them into ovens and killing any who had not yet escaped and had not already suffocated from the fine ash.
About 1500 bodies were found in Pompeii and Herculaneum when they were unearthed centuries later. Those 1500 bodies were recovered from but a small area of that impacted by the volcano’s eruption and extrapolating to the surrounding regions, total casualties are estimated to have been in the tens of thousands.
The towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, whose populations at the time numbered about 20,000, were buried beneath up to 20 feet of volcanic ash and pumice. Tragic and terrifying as that was, the ash deposits did a remarkably effective job of preserving those towns nearly entire, thus affording future historians an unrivaled snapshot of 1st century AD Roman architecture, city planning, urban infrastructure, and town life in general.
Read More: Things You Didn’t Know About the Tragic Town of Pompeii and the Volcanic Eruption That Destroyed It.