In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius famously erupted, spewing a cloud of stones, ash and fumes 33 kilometres in to the air. More than 2,000 people died and the thriving Roman city of Pompeii (as told in the Nature of Things doc, Pompeii's People) was buried under metres of ash for centuries.
The only surviving eyewitness account was documented in two letters written by Pliny the Younger to historian Tacitus. "Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room," he wrote. We now know that the eruption had 100,000 times the thermal energy of the Hiroshima bombing.
Read Full Article »