It's incredible seeing how everything kind of ties
together in one region.
I find it really striking to walk around a corner
and come across an ancient Roman site, and then look to the left
and see an old volcano.
It's all here.
We are in the town of Pozzuoli, which is located
nearby the city of Naples.
This is a volcanic province in southern Italy.
It's a really cool place to study
the interaction of geology, Roman archeology,
and volcanology.
The students are working in groups
to choose a different site, be that an archaeological site
or a volcano.
We fly the drone over these sites,
and it captures images at certain intervals along a kind
of set flight path.
And then we have this extremely impressive software.
And with a bunch of photos the software
identifies common points, but taken from different angles.
And then stitching together all the photos,
creates a photo-realistic three dimensional model.
We can actually take accurate measurements of the areas.
We have the area right in front of our eyes at that point.
We can get much more of a precise sense
of the size of the pillars in the marketplace,
and Pozzuoli, or the width of the crater of Mount Vesuvius.
You can zoom in and understand things
that would be inaccessible to us at the site,
and I think that's especially important
because these sites are ancient and fragile and delicate.
We get to preserve them in kind of a new way using that 3D
mapping drone technology.
There are people from all sorts of different backgrounds.
There is, you know, multiple engineering students
like myself.
There's also students who study classics,
and students to study chemistry, and students who
study geology and geophysics.
I think it's really, really powerful
to be in an environment where you
can combine your skills and your different perspectives,
and then you get much more diverse and creative solutions.
There is, in fact, large amounts of tectonic and volcanic
activity in the area surrounding this town.
It has all of these natural phenomenon going on
under and around it, including Mount
Vesuvius and the Caldeira, that spans this whole area.
This has been one of the larger challenges for the people
who are living in this area who have had to evacuate, or even
in more ancient history when all of the people in towns
like Herculaneum and Pompeii were then
killed due to the eruption.
I grew up here and I was a teenager
when, in 1982, this town was evacuated
for at least two years because the fear
of an impending eruption.
The volcanoes in this region, particularly,
spew ash and this ash that they release
is one of the big things that we're looking at because it
was used in Roman concrete.
When the Romans discovered that mixing the pozzolanic ash
with water created very, very strong rock,
they proceeded to export this ash across the region.
It shows a huge intersection between volcanic activity
and its impact on the history of this region.
Today Roman concrete is still of great interest
because, as we know, this concrete is very durable.
So it's our interest to leverage knowledge between geophysics,
archeology, and engineering to make new sustainable materials.
For students, it's very important
to be here because they can establish connections
between what they study, and books, and journals,
with the actual reality.
The history seems so much more real when you're actually
there, and inspires all sorts of intuitions and curiosity.
The reason we're so fascinated with these amphitheaters
and these marketplaces is because that human aspect,
that's our history.
Seeing those first hand is, I think, the only way
to really understand.
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