Pompeii: one "film" 32 hours reconstructs the details of the tragedy

In two studies published in the Journal of the Geological Society, a group of researchers from the Federico II University of Naples traced a minute report by minute of the Pompeii tragedy that took place almost 2 thousand years ago.

A sort of 32 -hour long film – and not 19 as it was thought – that tells the fate of the 16 thousand people Stayed buried during one of the most lethal volcanic events in history, which could also be repeated in the future. From the report it shows that there would be a temporal window of 5 hours in which the residents could escape, But in the end they did not do it for too much fear. The eruption of Vesuvius began on 24 August 79 AD, around noon. The 600 -meter volcano initially errupted a colossal in the air cloud of rocky fragments and gas, Note as a “eruptive column”.

Starting at about 14:00, a larger pieces of pumice began to rain, a porous volcanic rock. It was then that Pompeii and its inhabitants began to be crushed, when slabs almost three meters threw themselves on the settlement. This devastating rain of fire would have threw the inhabitants of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneumbut some would have survived looking for shelter.

However, five hours later, at 19:06, the first of the “pyroclastic currents” of the volcano began to overwhelm the city: mortal flows of hot and poisonous gases and volcanic particles spilled along the slope of the mountain at 200 km/h. These hot gas currents have vaporized people and even transformed human glass fabrics into a process known as vitrification.

The gas currents continued to hit during the night and the following day at intervals of about 80 minutes. At dawn on August 25, the eruptive column collapsed on the ground. There Pyroclastic Corrent More lethal hit instead at 7:07 in the morning after the eruption. For nine consecutive hours, a hot flow of debris, 24 kilometers wide, it winded from the crater of the volcano along the slope, wrapping Pompeii in a lethal cloud.

Around 16:00, the volcano began to mix with the water present in the subsoil, making it more explosive and the finest pyroclastic flow. This phase of the flow traveled about 24 kilometers from the crater but did not contain human remains, which suggests that very few – if not none – of the inhabitants of Pompeii He was still alive at this point. Finally, at 8.05 pm, the eruption ceased. The other study discovered that, in the unlikely case that someone was still alive, The survivors would have been killed by a possible earthquake. This new research suggests that some residents could have survived if they fled during the five hours between 14:00 and 19:00 on the first day, but they did not want to do it because of the dangers, such as the rain of debris. The corpses of the inhabitants of Pompeii is said to have been kept in a Protective celery envelope, within which they slowly decomposed. The remaining structures allow us to see the positions in which people died.

From the mid -1800s, The voids left by the bodies were filled with chalk to recreate their last moments. The most important testimony we have from the eruption is that of Pliny the young man. Pliny, who was only 17 years old, wrote a series of letters describing what he had seen in detail. In particular, an episode testified in which he saw a cloud in the shape of an umbrella looming on Vesuvius around 13:00: it was the eruptive column. The Vesuvius Today it is still considered one of the volcanoes most dangerous in the world. It is active and could erupt again, even if we cannot predict when.