Watch Pompeii be destroyed
August 28, 2016 4:34 PM   Subscribe

 
Not convinced this is a double as such but it does say 'via Metafilter' at the bottom of the article, with a link to this post...
posted by motty at 4:53 PM on August 28, 2016 [5 favorites]


Myself, I had no idea that it took so long. Of course, a volcano operates on its own schedule, but there was a lot of time from when it became clear that the sky was falling until things were so awful that anyone who had refused to leave was dead.

I knew that a lot of people left the town and went down the river to the port, to hide in a cave. Now I understand that there was enough time for that.

Not that it did them any good; the final scene when the pyroclastic went over the town is frankly terrifying. But another surprise (for me) was that it didn't totally bury the town. I was expecting a field of ash with no trace of anything else, like we saw in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest after Mt. St. Helens blew up. If anything, the Vesuvius eruption was even larger, but I guess the explosion distributed its debris and destruction over a wider area.

Another thing I found terrifying was how much of the mountain was blown away. It looks like most of it was gone.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:53 PM on August 28, 2016


A different point: if the same explosion took place today the death toll would be in the millions. There's a reason Vesuvius is one of the "Decade Volcanoes".
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:02 PM on August 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Man, those GoPros sure are durable.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:14 PM on August 28, 2016 [12 favorites]


Had to turn the sound off. Screaming dogs hurt my heart.

Interesting work, though. Thanks for the post.
posted by Mooski at 5:39 PM on August 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


Wow. And that was terrifying.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:41 PM on August 28, 2016


Someone who was actually there posted in the comments section. Pretty unbelievable if you ask me.
posted by dephlogisticated at 5:46 PM on August 28, 2016 [1 favorite]




What about Herculaneum?
posted by hippybear at 5:58 PM on August 28, 2016


I have always been fascinated by volcanoes; a favorite bedtime story of mine was to have mom or dad read the entry on volcanoes in the Golden Book Encyclopedia (right at the end of volume 15) to me. Amazingly, I did not become a geologist. Perhaps less amazingly, Pompeii has always held a great fascination for me. On a trip to Italy some years ago I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the city, although we only spent a few hours there; I could have spent a week. (But since Italy is full of amazing things, it would have meant missing something else almost as good.) I could watch this animation again and again, but yes the dogs and screams are a reminder that as long ago as it was, it was still a terrible tragedy. I couldn't help but wonder if this was one of the barking dogs.
posted by TedW at 6:40 PM on August 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


I remember, as a child, reading a National Geographic magazine where they poured plaster into the holes that used to be people. And then they had some incredible statues that were mothers holding children. And people curled up, in the last moments of their lives.

It gave me nightmares for many years.
posted by Splunge at 6:44 PM on August 28, 2016 [5 favorites]


I originally saw this video as part of the touring museum exhibit, where it was projected onto a gigantic screen. That was...disturbing (as were the replicas of the plaster body casts).
posted by thomas j wise at 6:47 PM on August 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


I saw the Pompeii AD 79 exhibit when it toured the US back in 1979. The plaster casts of dogs and humans were nightmare fuel to 11 year old me for a long time. It was fascinating and the whole disaster was horrible, but man... I was not prepared for those plaster casts.
posted by hippybear at 6:52 PM on August 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Someone who was actually there posted in the comments section. Pretty unbelievable if you ask me.

I totally get the joke, obviously, but I almost couldn't watch this video.

Twenty-five years ago in June this year, my mother, my brother, and I were evacuated from Clark AFB, situated in the shadow of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines (previously), along with thousands of other people. These families were welcomed into the homes of strangers at Subic Bay Navy base about 50 miles away. We were told we'd be back in 3 days' time. And then Pinatubo erupted with more force than anyone had predicted and even where we were, day became night and the surrounding areas were decimated.

Not only was there the incredible eruption and related earthquakes and tremors, but cubic miles of ash falling from the sky mixed with cyclonic winds and rain from an otherwise normal, seasonal typhoon occurring at the same time. The ash became so heavy and the winds so strong that buildings collapsed. At night, I laid awake in a borrowed bed with my mom and listened as the trees in the tropical rainforest surrounding us snapped like twigs. The power and water went out almost immediately. We collected rain water to take makeshift sponge baths and flush toilets. It went on for days. We felt relatively safe in Subic, where the ash seemed like strange snow and we could still go outside, but everyone worried about the 'mission essential' loved ones we left behind. My dad was still at Clark. We hadn't been able to communicate for days and had no idea if he was safe or alive.

Thankfully, he was, but we had to complete our evacuation to the States and he had to stay to support the base shut-down and the effort to safely ship whatever goods weren't ruined home to families. He served through months of aftershocks and lahar runs and witnessed far more of tragedy than I'm sure he'll ever tell me. We left in June. He returned to us just before Thanksgiving that year.

We were all so lucky to live in a world technologically advanced enough to have some warning but no one can ever be prepared enough for that kind of devastation. As a military family in the Philippines, we were rarely shielded from the vast poverty and lack of resources that surrounded us but I am sure the difference was never more clear than when Clark AFB was emptied of its dependents but so many of our neighbors in Angeles City had no where else to go.

Most of our classrooms had spent a lot of time learning about volcanoes before the eruption that spring and even though we could see one puffing smoke from the playground, it was so hard to worry or feel scared until we studied Pompeii. There's just something about seeing the frozen aftermath of a world-ending event that never leaves you.
posted by juliplease at 7:04 PM on August 28, 2016 [62 favorites]


I remember seeing this video in a darkened room surrounded by artifacts from Pompeii. It was a touring exhibit at the California Science Center a couple years ago. It was a very sobering experience.
posted by linux at 7:07 PM on August 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


I must have missed the video in the museum exhibit, but the thing that really got me was a timeline of when you had to have left (by land or water) in order to get out in time.
posted by quaking fajita at 7:09 PM on August 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Do not click this if you're not a fan of the plaster casts; do click this if you like osteology, CAT scans, and 19th century forgery trickery.
posted by jetlagaddict at 7:09 PM on August 28, 2016 [6 favorites]


For more from Pliny the Younger, whose account of the eruption and of his uncle's death always deserve to be read:

Elsewhere there was daylight by this time, but they were still in darkness, blacker and denser than any ordinary night, which they relieved by lighting torches and various kinds of lamp. My uncle decided to go down to the shore and investigate on the spot the possibility of any escape by sea, but he found the waves still wild and dangerous. A sheet was spread on the ground for him to lie down, and he repeatedly asked for cold water to drink. Then the flames and smell of sulphur which gave warning of the approaching fire drove the others to take flight and roused him to stand up. He stood leaning on two slaves and then suddenly collapsed, I imagine because the dense fumes choked his breathing by blocking his windpipe which was constitutionally weak and narrow and often inflamed. When daylight returned on the 26th—two days after the last day he had seen—his body was found intact and uninjured, still fully clothed and looking more like sleep than death.
posted by jetlagaddict at 7:14 PM on August 28, 2016 [9 favorites]


Thinking about this reminds me of one of my earliest memories, witnessing the explosion of the Frontier Oil Refinery in Cheyenne, Wyoming when I was 5 years old. We lived very close to the oil refinery at the time, and I remember I was playing outside in the yard when there was a loud explosion. I looked up and the sky was filling with black smoke. I thought it was the end of the world.

Of course, that doesn't compare to Pompeii. This was a really interesting video. I never realized before that it took so many hours for the eruption to occur. I had just assumed that most people in Pompeii died because of being spontaneously buried in burning ash with only a few minutes' warning. Thanks for posting.
posted by a strong female character at 7:34 PM on August 28, 2016


was not prepared for those plaster casts.

What is it about those casts? I've seen photos of worse, I've watched some pretty fucking awful stuff happen on live television, I've looked at things where even though you couldn't quite see it your brain could fill in the blanks just fine, and yes...those plaster casts.

I don't know what the normal tourist experience is of them. I was there in 1994, and there weren't any on official display. You could buy a book that had photos of some of them, but the book and the photos were not very good. At one point we walked past a fenced-off storage area that had a number of broken bits of things on shelves and some iron things and maybe three plaster casts. We probably stood there 40 minutes staring at them.

(I originally conflated the article with the poster's name when I scrolled past this the first time and had a brief glorious-horrible moment imagining a chocolate Vesuvius destroying a shortbread Pompeii and...there's probably a Russian oligarch who already had that for his son's 17th birthday.)
posted by Lyn Never at 8:29 PM on August 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


What is it about those casts?

The thing that gets me about them is that it's ~2000 years ago and we know Julius Caesar and Marc Antony and Pliny and the other great people, but we also know that dog, and the lovers whose skeletons were found together, and that person who's just squatting there waiting for death. And they're totally anonymous, we don't know their names or who they were or how they loved but they're there and we can know how they died, and we can pity them.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:15 PM on August 28, 2016 [6 favorites]


It goes beyond pity, I think, dear ship's mind. We identify with the dead whose last moments are reified in those casts.

More than thirty years ago I could talk a blue streak on how the casts are precursors of modern art, of dada, of the wholesale industrial slaughters of the twentieth century and those yet to come in this. They provoke a more powerful response than actual corpses. That is something that other sculptures don't do, not even the recent competitors in morbid display, plastinated corpses in various states of anatomical disassembly.

That line of talk has faded. I wish I could unleash it again with the ease of my youth.
posted by mwhybark at 10:30 PM on August 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


A relative was a photographer in WWII. He was in the army as it made its way up Italy in 1944. Vesuvius wasn't holding back just because there was a war on. He took pictures of the lava flowing down the street of one of the towns. I am still trying to acquire the photos. They looked something like this, but were of better quality.
posted by Xoc at 1:04 AM on August 29, 2016


Hippybear, I wonder if that side flow at 1 am wasn't the one that destroyed Herculaneum?

I had no idea that the eruption lasted so long. I just assumed it happened quickly, even though I've seen the casts of the people huddled in the storerooms in Herculaneum, so knew that the people had time to run and seek shelter.

Also, just wow.
posted by kanewai at 1:40 AM on August 29, 2016


The video was so well-done, but I wish I could un-hear the screaming people and the yelping dogs.
posted by kimberussell at 6:59 AM on August 29, 2016


This is some pretty good computer simulation for 79 AD.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 7:21 AM on August 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


I wonder if that side flow at 1 am wasn't the one that destroyed Herculaneum?

I think that's about right
posted by thelonius at 7:40 AM on August 29, 2016


I remember well that some sixty years ago my mother read to my brother and me, "The Dog of Pompeii" by Louis Untermeyer. The little detail of raisins is especially vivid (even if there was some license taken with facts.)
posted by namret at 7:53 AM on August 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


If you're at all interested, Vesuvius: A Biography is a fantastic book. And it leads me to quibble with the video; Scarth uses descriptions of armies camping out on it prior to 79 to give picture of the volcano that did not look like that; it had been dormant since the bronze age, and was a smooth hill, not that shape. And I can understand why they've done it, but dim as they've made it, there's too much light - people who died were running away carrying lamps because it was so dark.
posted by Vortisaur at 11:29 AM on August 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'd always thought the pyroclastic flow was first, and struck without warning—knowing everyone was hiding in fear for so long is much worse :(

Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.

I'm always flabbergasted by the fact that people didn't know that it was localized and that the rest of the world would go on okay. Because how would you, at that time? Now it's unimaginable. I look at images like this and think, wow, the world was a lot smaller once, and a lot more terrifying.
posted by you're a kitty! at 5:13 PM on August 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


I went to the Pompeii exhibition at the British Museum the other year. It was excellent, and very specifically designed to get maximum emotional response to the casts.

You spent a lot of time finding out about the people of Pompeii and looking at artefacts that helped you realise that they were just like you and me: workers, families, business owners, people having arguments and scrawling graffiti, naughty kids, lovers, religious people etc.

And then, as you left, you went though empty rooms with some of the casts positioned as they were found, collapsed and huddled in corners of rooms. People, you now understood, who weren't abstract ideas from the past, but like your own family and neighbours.

I saw not a few grown men, including me, welling up. It was unexpected and extremely well done.
posted by dowcrag at 4:06 AM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


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