Did You Know?

During the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, ash fell as far away as Africa.

From beginning to end, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius lasted approximately 24 hours.

In Roman times, the city of Pompeii was best known as a vacation resort for Roman nobility.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 was roughly ten times larger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980.

At the peak of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, magma, ash and gas were released from the volcano at a rate of 100,000 tons every second, traveling upwards at the speed of a jet plane to reach 33 kilometers in height – that’s 3.5 times the height of Mount Everest!

Pompeii was not the only city destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Four miles to the north, the nearby city of Herculaneum was destroyed by a pyroclastic surge.

A pyroclastic surge is an extremely hot and fast moving mixture of volcanic material made up of deadly gasses and ash.

Archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who oversaw the excavation of the city from 1860 to 1875, discovered that the bodies of people and animals smothered by ash had disintegrated, leaving cavities. Fiorelli and his team poured liquid plaster into these voids, creating detailed casts of people in their last moments.

Pliny the Younger witnessed, and survived, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, and later described the event in a letter to his friend and Roman historian, Tacitus.

Pliny the Younger’s description of the eruption was so keen and descriptive that volcanologists now call an eruption of this type a “Plinian Eruption.”

Mount Vesuvius experiences a Plinian Eruption approximately once every 2,000 years.