HISTORIANS have mapped out a minute-by-minute account of the final moments in Pompeii as gas and ash transformed locals into glass.
A staggering 16,000 people were buried during one of the deadliest volcanic events in history, and researchers now understand what happened during those 32 hours of hell.
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The ground-breaking new study suggests there was a five-hour window when residents could have escaped – but were too frightened to do so.
Mount Vesuvius began to erupt on August 24 in AD 79 at around noon.
The 2,000 ft volcano in the Gulf of Naples, on Italy‘s west coast, first spewed a colossal cloud of rocky fragments and gas into the air, known as the “eruption column”.
From around 2pm, larger chunks of pumice – a porous volcanic rock – began to rain down.
This is when Pompeii and its people started to be crushed, as slabs up to nine feet thick crashed onto the settlement.
This devastating fiery shower would have sent the residents of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum into a total panic – but some would have survived by seeking shelter.
However, five hours later, at 7:06pm, the first of the volcano’s “pyroclastic currents” began to engulf the town.
These are deadly flows of hot, poisonous gases and volcanic particles that flooded down the mountainside at 124mph.
These scorching gas currents vaporised people and even turned human tissue into glass, in a process known as vitrification.
The gas currents continued overnight and into the following day at intervals of approximately 80 minutes.
At sunrise on August 25, the eruptive column collapsed onto the ground.
The deadliest pyroclastic current struck at 7:07 am the morning after the eruption.
For nine hours straight, a scalding flow of debris – 15 miles across – snaked from the volcano’s crater and down the hillside, consuming Pompeii in a lethal cloud.
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By 4pm, the volcano began to mix with water under the ground which made it more explosive and the pyroclastic flow finer.
This stage of the flow travelled around 15 miles from the crater byt not contain human remains, which suggests that very few – if any – of Pompeii’s residents were alive by this stage.
Finally, At 8.05 pm, the eruption ceased.
Another study has found that, in the unlikely event anybody was still alive, the survivors would have been killed by an ensuing earthquake.
This new research suggests some residents could have survived if they’d fled during the five-hour period between 2pm and 7pm on the first day, but were unwilling to due to the dangers, such as raining debris.
The corpses of Pompeii residents were famously preserved in a protect casing of ash within which they slowly decayed.
The resultant structures allow us to see the positions in which people perished.
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Since the mid 1800s, the voids left by the bodies have been filled with plaster to recreate their final moments.
The study, published in the Journal of the Geological Society and reported by Science, extends the timeline of the eruption from 19 to 32 hours.
The most famous eye-witness account of the eruption comes from a Roman administrator called Pliny the Younger.
Pliny, who was just 17, wrote a series of letter describing what he saw in vivid detail.
He recorded watching an umbrella-like cloud looming over Mount Vesuvius at around 1pm – this was the eruption column.
Mount Vesuvius today is again considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world.
It is still active and could erupt again, although predicting when volcanoes will blow is an extremely difficult task for volcanologists.
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