|
RETURN
TO THE WORLD SCIENCE HOME PAGE
Pompeii destruction wasn’t worst
Vesuvius had to offer: study
March 6,
2006
Special to World Science
The horrifying destruction of Pompeii, a thriving southern Italian resort town buried by the erupting Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D., wasn’t the worst that the volcano has inflicted,
geologists have found.
 |
A young woman buried by the
eruption known as the Avellino event.
(Courtesy PNAS)
|
 |
Footprints of two fugitives in surge ash deposit of the Avellino eruption of San Paolo
Belsito, near Nola, Italy. Thousands of footprints directed away from volcano suggest a mass
exodus, researchers say. (Courtesy PNAS)
|
They report in a new study that Vesuvius erupted even more violently two millennia
earlier, causing a mass flight from a prehistoric village and devastating the area
of present-day Naples for centuries afterward.
The evidence left behind includes thousands of footprint trails leading out of the area, attesting to a
rapid, mass exodus, said the researchers, who studied a village about 15 km (9 miles) north-northwest of Vesuvius.
“Scenes of everyday life, frozen by the volcanic deposits, testify that people suddenly left the village,” the researchers wrote in this week’s online edition of the research journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
These included “the moulds of four huts, with pottery and other objects left inside; skeletons of a dog and nine pregnant goat victims found in a cage; and footprints of adults, children, and cows filled by the first fallout pumice.”
Most people apparently managed to escape, they wrote, noting that Vesuvius, for all its violence, often gives some advance warning of its outbursts. But not everyone was so lucky.
In one place, skeletons of a man and a woman “dramatically testify to their unlucky escape attempt and their death due to suffocation,” they wrote. They ended up lying under one meter (39 inches) of pumice, a volcanic glass formed by solidified lava.
After the eruption, a few settlements were quickly rebuilt but soon deserted,
probably because of the area’s extreme environmental devastation, the researchers said.
A similar eruption today could destroy Naples and surrounding areas, the researchers say, adding that these findings could serve as a warning sign for the area’s disaster planners. “At present, at least 3 million people live within the area destroyed by the Avellino” event.
Eruptions at Vesuvius have a characteristic pattern in which plumes of ash are launched into the stratosphere. They are named Plinian eruptions after Pliny the Younger, a Roman statesman who wrote an account of the 79 A.D. event.
* * *
Send us a comment
on this story, or send
it to a friend
|