Darkness came first, as the gigantic cloud over Vesuvius devoured the sky.
A gentle snow of ash drifted through the twilight.
Then the rain of pumice, rattling like hail on the rooftops.
Most of Pompeii’s citizens fled, clutching prized possessions, warding off the falling
stones with cushions or cloaks.
But many, unwilling or unable to leave their homes, remained.
With a muffled rasp, the pumice piled on roofs and filled the streets.
Some Pompeiians were trapped behind buried doors or crushed by collapsing roofs.
Others tried to escape through the sea of stones, groping and stumbling as static lightning
arced overhead.
All night the pumice fell.
All night, even in closed rooms, ash choked the air.
All night, the mountain thundered.
Shortly after dawn, a new sound filled Pompeii.
A few fugitives may have seen the source just before it killed them: a fiery cloud, descending
with incomprehensible speed.
For everyone else, it was only a sound – indistinct at first, then resolving, in the last few
seconds, into an elemental chorus of howling wind and disintegrating buildings and human
screams.
Then agony, and nothing at all.
This video will investigate the eruption that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD,
and contextualize that disaster in a broader history of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples.
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And now, Vesuvius.
Beneath southern Italy, continents are colliding.
Africa is plunging under Europe, throwing up mountain ranges, spawning earthquakes,
and sending stray plumes of magma through the fractured crust.
Where these plumes reach the surface, a volcano is born.
The most active volcano in Italy is Stromboli, which has been erupting continuously for thousands
of years.
The largest is Etna, which looms 11,000 feet (3,350 m) over the Sicilian coast.
But the most dangerous Italian volcano, arguably the most dangerous anywhere on the planet,
is Vesuvius.
Vesuvius has existed for tens of thousands of years, bursts of furious activity alternating
with long periods of dormancy.
The mountain last came to life in March 1944, in the midst of the allied invasion of Italy.
Although lava flows damaged several villages and ash disabled dozens of military aircraft,
this was a relatively minor episode.
Geologists rank the severity of eruptions by the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI).
The scale increases logarithmically, so that an eruption with a VEI of 2 is ten times the
size of an eruption with a VEI of 1.
The eruption of Vesuvius in 1944 had a VEI of 3 – substantial, but not very remarkable,
since several eruptions of that size occur somewhere on Earth almost every year.
Vesuvius alone has produced about two dozen eruptions on the same scale over the past
400 years.
The volcano’s last major eruption, which took place in December 1631, had a VEI of
5.
The eruptive column blotted out the sun, sending ash as far as Constantinople.
Torrents of lava and clouds of superheated gas rushed downslope, killing thousands.
There were other major eruptions during the early Middle Ages, including one that sent
mudflows surging through the heart of Naples.
But none of these could compare with the eruption of 79 AD, which entombed Pompeii and Herculaneum.
This was Vesuvius’ most violent historical eruption, with a VEI approaching 6.
It produced about thirty times the amount of debris generated by the 1631 eruption,
devastated a vast area, and sent ash as far as Syria and Egypt.
Before 79 AD, Vesuvius had been dormant for many centuries.
Vineyards climbed its slopes, a forest flourished in its crater, and the fertile lands in its
shadow were a sea of farms and villas, threaded together by the busy roads leading to Pompeii
and Herculaneum.
Neither town was especially large – Pompeii, with perhaps 12,000 inhabitants, was about
three times the size of Herculaneum – but both were prosperous centers of the fertile
region around the volcano.
In the decades before the eruption, several Roman authors noticed similarities between
the rocks of Vesuvius and the volcanic debris spewed forth by Mount Etna.
There seem, however, to have been no fears of an eruption.
Like the Greeks before them, the Romans were mystified by volcanic activity.
So when the mountain began to stir in the autumn of 79, the warning signs were neither
understood nor heeded.
One of those surprised by the eruption was Pliny the Younger, a youth staying with his
Uncle – also named Pliny – at Misenum, across the Bay of Naples from Pompeii.
When a huge cloud appeared over Vesuvius, the elder Pliny, who was commander of the
local Roman fleet, sailed to investigate on a fast warship.
As he approached the volcano, he found the sea choked with floating pumice.
Undeterred, he landed at Stabiae, a few miles past Pompeii, and slept in a friend’s villa,
ignoring the drifts of debris building up outside.
At last, afraid that the house would be entirely buried, Pliny and his companions tied cushions
to their heads and ventured into the pelting stones.
Unable to escape by sea, they were overtaken by a cloud of hot ash, and Pliny died by the
shore.
Back in Misenum, Pliny the Younger – unaware of his uncle’s fate – was becoming increasingly
worried about his own safety.
A series of earthquakes shook the house, tsunamis battered the shore below, and pumice clattered
on the roof.
Then, on the morning of the eruption’s second day, a menacing black cloud began to glide
across the bay.
Pliny and his mother fled, but the cloud caught them on the road, wrapping them in darkness
and buffeting them with grit.
When the shadow passed, Pliny found himself in a landscape shrouded with ash.
From Pliny’s account, and with the geological evidence of the debris around Vesuvius, we
can track the progress of the eruption fairly closely.
It began with a column of pumice and hot gases that punched 20 miles (32 km) into the atmosphere.
Pushed by a steady northwest wind, the eruptive column drifted over Pompeii.
Pumice began to fall from the cloud, accumulating at a rate of about 6 inches (15 cm) an hour.
By the morning of the eruption’s second day, the city had been smothered beneath more
than 9 feet (2.8 m) of debris.
The worst, however, was yet to come.
It struck Herculaneum first.
Though closer to Vesuvius than Pompeii, Herculaneum had been upwind of the eruptive column, and
had only experienced a light rain of pumice.
Most of the inhabitants had taken the opportunity to flee, but hundreds remained, sheltering
in a row of boat houses along the harbor.
Early on the second day, death came to these fugitives in the form of a pyroclastic surge.
A pyroclastic surge is a superheated cloud of ash and volcanic gas, often accompanied
by a chaotic avalanche of debris.
It moves with incredible speed, sometimes upward of 400 mph (650 km/h), and is lethally
hot, with temperatures that can exceed 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius).
The devastation it causes is often apocalyptic.
During the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a pyroclastic
surge swept over the city of Saint-Pierre, battering down masonry walls, scything through
the ships in the harbor, and instantly killing all but two of the 28,000 inhabitants.
The surge that struck Herculaneum was equally destructive.
In a matter of seconds, as the burning cloud cascaded over the buildings and found the
refugees in the boathouses, every living thing in the city died.
Pompeii’s turn came a few hours later, when another pyroclastic surge, moving faster than
any horse could gallop, roared over the city.
As at Herculaneum, it killed everyone it caught, whether they were hiding in their half-buried
houses or trying to escape across the dunes of pumice.
Their bodies dropped in beds of glowing ash, and the city collapsed upon them, roofs and
walls, columns and trees, tumbled and broken by the fury of the eruption.
Then, little more than a day after it began, the worst was over.
Ghostly curtains of ash frayed in the gathering light.
The waves of the bay beat their ancient rhythm against a newborn shore.
And a red-rimmed sun settled, cinder-cold, over the buried city of Pompeii.
Stay tuned for the third and final part of my Pompeii series next week.
In the meantime, if you enjoyed this video, please consider supporting toldinstone on
Patreon.
You might also enjoy my book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants.
Thanks for watching.