Mount Vesuvius Research Paper

Mount Vesuvius is a volcano near the Bay of Naples in Italy. The volcano is hundreds of thousands of years old. It has erupted over 50 times. The most known eruption took place in 79 A.D. In 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius erupted onto the city of Pompeii. One witness wrote that the volcanic ash “poured across the land” and covered the city in “a darkness… like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.” When the volcano erupted it killed around 2,000 people. Even though the volcano covered the city in a thick layer of volcanic ash and lava, in 1748 a group of scientist found that after you dug through the layer of ash the majority of the city is still intact. This wasn’t the first major eruption the volcano has dished out. In 1780 B.C. it erupted and

launched super-hot lava, ash, and rocks 22 miles into the sky. This eruption is known as the “Avellino eruption”. This eruption destroyed everything in a 15-mile radius of the mountain. There was (in a way) a warning that something really bad was about to happen to Mount Vesuvius. In 63 A.D. there was a major earthquake in the Campania area. However, more and more people went there every year. There was a person who was across the bay who wrote about the eruption (his name was “Pliny the Younger”), and he compared the “cloud of unusual size and appearance to a Pine Tree that “rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches”. Today, Geologists call this type of eruption a “Plinean eruption”. When the cloud of dust began to cool it drifted down in layers, and Pliny the Younger wrote “I believed I was perishing with the world, and the world with me.” Then the final blow was a “pyroclastic surge” (a 100-mile-per-hour surge of really hot poison-gas and pulverized rock) poured down the side of the volcano and finished the job of destroying Pompeii.