16 thousand people turned to glass: new details of how Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii have emerged

Groundbreaking research reveals new details of how the deadly Mount Vesuvius destroyed the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in 79 AD. Gas and ash turned 16,000 people to glass.

Experts say they know what happened during those 32 hours of hell when thousands of people were buried alive. A new study shows that there was a five-hour window when residents could have fled Pompeii and saved themselves, but were too scared to do so, TheSun reports.

Mount Vesuvius, a 600-meter-high volcano, is known to be located in the Gulf of Naples, on the west coast of Italy. On August 24, 79 AD, around noon, it spewed a colossal cloud of rock and gas into the air, known as the "eruption column."

At about 14:00, large chunks of pumice – a porous volcanic rock – began to fall. It was then, according to the researchers, that a devastating firestorm led to complete panic among the inhabitants of Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum, writes DailyMail.

However, a significant number of people could have survived if they had left their homes during the five hours of the first day, but did not do so because of the rain of debris falling from the sky, experts say.

However, five hours after the eruption began, the first of the volcano's "pyroclastic flows" began to consume the city. And these deadly streams of hot, poisonous gases and volcanic particles rushed down the mountainside at 200 kilometers per hour, scientists say.

According to the researchers, these scorching gas streams vaporized people and even turned human tissue into glass in a process known as vitrification.

The gas flows continued throughout the night and into the next day at intervals of about 80 minutes. And at sunrise on August 25, the eruptive column fell to the ground, experts say.

The deadliest pyroclastic flow occurred at 7:07 a.m. the next day after the eruption. That is, for nine hours, a scorching stream of debris meandered from the volcano's crater down the hillside, engulfing Pompeii in a deadly cloud, researchers say.

By 16:00, the volcano began to mix with water underground, making it more explosive and the pyroclastic flow smaller.

According to experts, this stage of the flow passed about 25 kilometers from the crater but contained no human remains, indicating that very few residents of Pompeii were still alive at this stage.

And only at 20:05 did the deadly eruption of Vesuvius stop, according to scientists.

It is known that the corpses of Pompeii residents were kept in a protective shell of ash, inside which they slowly decomposed. To preserve the structures of the bodies, scientists began filling the voids with plaster in the mid-1800s.

Today, Vesuvius is again considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. It is still active and can erupt again. However, predicting when this will happen is an extremely difficult task for volcanologists, experts say.

In the XX century, new Pompeii emerged near the excavations – a modern city with an ancient name, where archaeologists continue to find new data about the terrible eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

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