Nearly 2,000 years ago, a huge volcano in southern Italy suddenly, explosively woke up. Ash and gas from the eruption killed at least 1,500 people in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. That event has gone down in history as one of the ancient world’s deadliest natural disasters. Now, a new study suggests that it wasn’t just erupting material that doomed Pompeii. Earthquakes may have been another killer.
Researchers shared their findings July 17 in Frontiers in Earth Science.
The volcano that savaged Pompeii and Herculaneum was Mount Vesuvius. It erupted in A.D. 79. Its thick clouds of superhot gas, ash and rock reached into the stratosphere. That choking, scalding mix quickly fell back to Earth, blanketing nearby cities.
Adding to the destruction were pyroclastic flows. These were dense torrents of hot gas and rock that sped down the volcano’s slopes toward the nearest cities.
Past excavations of Pompeii revealed people fully encased in ash. Their bodies tell the tale of a swift, scalding end. In Herculaneum, people that sheltered in stone boathouses may have survived the heat only to slowly suffocate from toxic volcanic gases.
But there’s also historical evidence of an earthquake during the disaster.
Roman author Pliny the Younger witnessed it from Misenum, across the Bay of Naples from the volcano. He later described the catastrophe in a series of letters. In one, he wrote of “earth tremors” felt at Misenum. Apparently, they became “so violent that everything felt as if it were being shaken and turned over.”Â
The force of the eruption could have caused such strong, seismic shocks, says Domenico Sparice. This volcanologist led the research. He works at Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia. That’s in Naples, Italy.
If earthquakes did rattle Pompeii, they may have forced the city’s people to make a deadly choice. Seek shelter from the eruption in buildings made unstable by quakes. Or…
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