In a new study led by geologists and archeologists from the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) and Pompeii Archaeological Park, the authors show that the destruction of the Roman town of Pompeii 2,000 years ago was a double disaster—a volcanic eruption by Mount Vesuvius followed by powerful earthquakes.
“We proved that seismicity during the eruption played a significant role in the destruction of Pompeii and, possibly, influenced the choices of the Pompeiians who faced an inevitable death,” explains Dr. Domenico Sparice, a volcanologist at INGV-Osservatorio Vesuviano and first author of the study, in an interview given to the online journal Frontiers.
“Correctly recognizing the cause-effect relationship is essential to reconstruct the interplay between volcanic and seismic phenomena, and their effects on buildings and humans,” adds coauthor Dr. Fabrizio Galadini, a geologist and senior researcher at INGV.
During excavations in one of the buildings preserved by a blanket of volcanic deposits, the researchers noted damage likely associated with seismic shaking, and more importantly, found two bodies with injuries nowadays observed after a strong earthquake.
“We found peculiar characteristics that were inconsistent with the effects of volcanic phenomena described in the volcanological literature devoted to Pompeii. There had to be a different explanation,” so coauthor Dr. Mauro Di Vito, a volcanologist and director of INGV-Osservatorio Vesuviano.
The eruption caught Pompeiians in the midst of daily life, as Mount Vesuvius erupted shortly after 1 pm according to the writings of Pliny the Younger, a Roman historian who survived the disaster. For about 18 hours, pumice, small rocks and ash particles fell on the city, causing people to seek shelter. When the eruption paused, inhabitants who had survived may have thought themselves safe—until strong earthquakes started.
“The people who did not flee their shelters were possibly overwhelmed by earthquake-induced collapses of already overburdened buildings. This was the fate of the two individuals we recovered,” says coauthor Dr. Valeria Amoretti, an anthropologist who heads the Applied Research Laboratory of Pompeii Archaeological Park.
There are several hints that these individuals did not die from inhaling ash or the extreme heat of a pyroclastic surge killing most people trapped inside the city’s walls.
Both skeletal remains rest on a layer of volcanic deposits, showing that they survived the initial volcanic eruption. The position of “individual 1”, a male aged around 50 years at the moment of his death, suggests that he was suddenly crushed by the collapse of a large wall fragment, resulting in severe traumas and broken bones. “Individual 2,” also a 50-yea-old male, however, may have been aware of the danger and tried to protect himself by crouching in a corner of the room and hiding beneath a round wooden object, of which the researchers found faint traces in the volcanic deposits, before being crushed to death.
A stone relief found in Pompeii shows the aftermath of an earthquake that struck the town 17 years before the deadly eruption. It is not clear if this quake was linked to the reawakening of Mount Vesuvius after the volcano lay dormant for over 1,000 years. When it finally erupted, likely in September or October of 79 C.E., the damage from the seismic shaking was still visible on some buildings.
Since the rediscovery of Pompeii in April 1748, the remains of over 1,150 individuals have been found in the excavated ruins. Buried in a single day by a series of pyroclastic flows and hours of ash-fall, forming a rocky barrier against grave robbers and erosion, the destruction of Pompeii also assured its preservation over time.
“New insight into the destruction of Pompeii gets us very close to the experience of the people who lived here 2,000 years ago. The choices they made as well as the dynamics of the events, which remain a focus of our research, decided over life and death in the last hours of the city’s existence,” concludes coauthor Dr. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
The full open-access paper “A novel view of the destruction of Pompeii during the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius: syn-eruptive earthquakes as an additional cause of building collapse and deaths” was published in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science and can be found online here.
Additional material and interviews provided by the online journal Frontiers.
