Pompei Earthquake

Pompeii, a town in Naples, Italy was built in 600 B.C.E. It housed around 20,000 people and was a busy port city for the ancient Romans.Nearby Mount Vesuvius, which is 7 miles away from Pompeii, stood 6,500 feet high. Pompeii became covered in ash by a volcanic explosion from Mount Vesuvius. This eruption also caused devastation in other cities like Herculean and most of the surrounding countryside. The eruption happened on the twenty-fourth through twenty-fifth of August, 79 C.E. The eruption took around 25 hours to cover the city. There were signs that the volcano was ready to erupt since there was a major earthquake that had happened 17 years beforehand and smaller earthquakes happened in the years just before the eruption. The town of Pompeii was only discovered around 300 years ago by archaeologists and excavated in 1748. The ash covered everything and the town people's casts are still there, more the shape of their body and not their actual

This is why, stated in the letters Pliny the Younger wrote to Tacitus that his uncle had wanted to see the “pine tree” shaped cloud coming from the mountain. He was just curious leaving on his ships to venture a little closer. He was an earth scientist back then and did not understand what what was going on. He thought it was just a bunch of clouds that made an interesting shape. This trip was ruined when he got a letter from an old friend who lived at the foot of the mountain. This outing turned into a rescue, which then caused the death of Pliny the Elder. He was calm till the very end, states Pliny the Younger in the letter. Pliny the Elder was a knowledgeable scientist but had no idea that this was a volcano. This shows that if he did not know about the volcano, then most people around him who, did not know as much as he did about the environment, could not have understood what was