Final moments of Pompeii revealed as gas and ash turned locals to glass and 16,000 people were buried across two days
Pompeii’s last moments, when gas and ash turned the inhabitants into glass, have been chronicled minute by minute by historians.
One of the most deadly volcanic eruptions in history resulted in the murder of an astounding 16,000 people.
Scientists believe they now know what transpired during those thirty-two hours of agony.
According to the groundbreaking new study, people had a five-hour window during which they could have fled, but most were too terrified to do so.
Around midday on August 24, AD 79, Mount Vesuvius started to erupt.
The “eruption column” was a massive cloud of gas and stone pieces that was initially thrown into the air by the 2,000-foot volcano in the Gulf of Naples on the west coast of Italy.
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Larger pieces of pumice, a porous volcanic rock, started to fall at about 2:00 pm.
At this point, boulders up to nine feet thick began to drop onto the settlement, crushing Pompeii and its residents.
Residents of Pompeii and the neighboring Herculaneum would have been in complete terror due to this destructive fire shower, although some would have escaped by taking cover.
But the first of the volcano’s “pyroclastic currents” started to sweep over the town at 7:06 p.m., five hours later.
At 124 mph, these lethal streams of hot, toxic gasses and volcanic debris poured down the mountainside.
People were vaporized by these blazing gas currents, and in a process called vitrification, human flesh was even transformed into glass.
Overnight and into the next day, the gas currents persisted at around 80-minute intervals.
On August 25, the eruptive column fell to the ground at dawn.
The morning following the eruption, at 7:07 am, the most lethal pyroclastic current struck.
Pompeii was consumed in a deadly haze for nine hours in a row by a fiery stream of debris that was 15 miles across and snaked down the hillside from the volcano’s crater.
By 4 p.m., the volcano started to combine with subterranean water, which increased its explosiveness and finened the pyroclastic flow.
Since there were no human remains found at this stage of the flow, which was around 15 miles from the crater, it is likely that very few, if any, of Pompeii’s inhabitants were still alive.
Eventually, the eruption stopped at 8:05 p.m.
According to another analysis, an earthquake that followed would have killed the survivors, assuming anyone was still alive.
According to this new study, some inhabitants would have survived if they had left during the five hours between 2 and 7 p.m. on the first day, but many chose not leave because of the risks, which included falling debris.
The famously preserved bodies of Pompeii’s inhabitants rotted slowly inside a protective ash coating.
We can see the positions where people died thanks to the resulting constructions.
Plaster has been used to fill in the spaces left by the bodies since the middle of the 19th century in an effort to recreate their last moments.
The study, which was reported by Science and published in the Journal of the Geological Society, increases the eruption’s duration from 19 to 32 hours.
Pliny the Younger, a Roman official, provides the most well-known eyewitness account of the eruption.
At the age of seventeen, Pliny wrote a series of letters vividly detailing his observations.
He captured footage of the eruption column—an umbrella-shaped cloud—looming above Mount Vesuvius at approximately 1:00 pm.
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Even now, Mount Vesuvius is regarded as one of the world’s most deadly volcanoes.
Although volcanologists find it very challenging to forecast when a volcano may blow, it is still active and may erupt again.