The last evacuation turned out to be just that when in , 40, people were evacuated from the Campi Flegrei area, but no eruption ever occurred. Italian authorities, especially in Campania, are implementing ongoing efforts to try and reduce the population in the red zone.
This involves demolishing illegally constructed apartment buildings, establishing a national park around the volcano to prevent any further structures from being built, as well as offering people significant financial incentives for moving away. The overall goal is to reduce the amount of time needed to evacuate the population. Authorities hope to reduce this time by two or three days in the next twenty to thirty years. In Naples, the Osservatorio Vesuvio Vesuvius Observatory closely monitors any activity in and around the volcano.
Using extensive networks of seismic and gravimetric stations, a combination of a GPS-based geodetic array and satellite-based synthetic aperture radar to measure ground movement, and local surveys and analyses of gases emitted from fumaroles, the volcano is under constant surveillance. This technology is all used to detect any rising magma underneath the volcano.
For the moment, no magma has been detected within 10 km of the surface, meaning it is currently classified at a Basic or Green Level. Naples: New Italian movie pokes fun at the Camorra. Why tourists skip Naples: debunking common misconceptions. Naples tobacconist who stole winning scratch card stopped in Rome airport. Seven things to do and see in Naples. Naples to open world's most beautiful metro station.
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If you have been to Napoli, you've surely noticed Mount Vesuvius towering over the city. How to get to Pompeii from Rome and back While the eruption in 79 AD that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum may be the mountain's most famous eruption, it is not the only or even the most destructive eruption in history.
History of the Vesuvius vulcano Formation Mount Vesuvius was formed as a result of a collision between the African and Eurasian tectonic plates, with the former being subducted beneath the latter. Mythology and Etymology Vesuvius has a very long history in mythology and literary tradition. Why tourists skip Naples: debunking common misconceptions The eruption would last for two days. A guide to Sorrento By the evening of the second day, the eruption was over. Naples: A city like no other thank goodness The initial eruption produced a cloud of ash and pumice that rained down on Pompeii, but not on Herculaneum which was up-wind.
The Two Plinys The two letters written by Pliny the Younger to the Historian Tacitus are the only surviving eyewitness accounts of the eruption. Getting to know Naples: Seven must-see tourist destinations Meanwhile, Pliny the Elder had received a message from his friend Rectina wife of Tascius who was living near the foot of the volcano. Casualties The total number of casualties is unknown. The red zone around Mount Vesuvious.
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Poetry 11 Nov, I have never said it to my mother, she was tette e latte. We urgently require teachers available in the afternoons to teach Cambridge exam courses on-site. Government archaeologists hastily excavated the site and removed the objects. As it turns out, the supermarket was never built, and all that remains of a site that miraculously captured one of civilization's earliest encounters with volcanic destruction is a hole in the ground on a vacant, weed-choked lot, the foundation walls of the huts barely visible.
A small, weathered sign proclaiming the "Pompeii of Prehistory" hangs limply from a padlocked gate. The sad archaeological scenario of Nola has repeated itself several times. In , an Italian construction company under contract to the U. Navy base in the southern Mediterranean uncovered another ash-covered village near the modern town of Gricignano di Aversa; it was, according to Mastrolorenzo, even more extensive than the Nola site, with traces of numerous Copper and Bronze Age huts.
In the summer of , during construction of the new high-speed railroad line between Naples and Rome, thousands of human footprints were uncovered near the town of Afragola. Geologic analysis established that they were the footprints of Bronze Age inhabitants fleeing the Avellino event.
The threesome rushed to photograph the vivid residue of that ancient terror. Despite the loss of these sites, Mastrolorenzo, Petrone, Pappalardo, and American volcanologist Michael Sheridan triggered worldwide fascination when they summarized these findings in the spring of in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS.
But their research went beyond mere archaeological documentation. The Avellino event, they wrote, "caused a social-demographic collapse and the abandonment of the entire area for centuries. In the world before Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami, these warnings might have sounded as remote and transitory as those prehistoric footsteps.
Not anymore. There are many ways for a human being to die after a volcano erupts, and a blast like the one Vesuvius unleashed in B. One of the bags contained a fine white powder, the ash that blanketed the fallout zone; the other was full of small rocks, no more than an inch or two in diameter. Some of the rocks were pumice, pebbles honeycombed with bubbles and nearly as light as Ping-Pong balls; others were dense and hard.
The first hint of the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius emerged in the early s when volcanologists identified pumice deposits underneath the A. But in recent years Mastrolorenzo, Pappalardo, and their colleagues, analyzing everything from meters-thick ash deposits visible in road cuts to micron-thin slices of volcanic crystals viewed in a scanning electron microscope, have reconstructed the Avellino event in harrowing detail.
Some eruptions ooze lava in picturesque, slow-moving streams. But in an event like Avellino, the conduit of the volcano is so tightly corked by solid rock that it takes an enormous amount of pressure building up from below, in the magma chamber, to blow a hole to the surface. When it does, the violence of the explosion—the boato, Italian for the enormous roar—propels liquid rock into the air so fast that it breaks the sound barrier, unleashing a sonic boom.
During the Avellino eruption, the boato accompanied a blast that hurled nearly , tons a second of superheated rock, cinders, and ash into the stratosphere. It reached an altitude of about 22 miles 35 kilometers —roughly three times the cruising altitude of commercial airliners. As this incredible cloud of material rose, it spread at the top, assuming the classic shape—classic ever since Pliny the Younger first described it in a letter to the Roman historian Tacitus about the later eruption that buried Pompeii—of an umbrella pine tree, the iconic feature of a plinian eruption.
Prevailing winds out of the west carried the bulk of the initial fallout in a northeasterly direction, toward Nola and Avellino, where pumice and lapilli deposits piled up as high as nine feet three meters near the volcano in several hours. The column of ash may have hovered in the air for up to 12 hours. Then it collapsed, producing an apocalyptic sequence of events that makes a plinian eruption one of the most lethal natural disasters on Earth. When a plinian column falls upon itself, it creates a pyroclastic surge—a boiling, turbulent avalanche of debris that shoots out sideways from the slopes of a volcano.
This searing cloud can travel for many miles, initially at great speed. Not too many humans have seen much less survived a pyroclastic surge at close quarters, but many of us have an image of its horrifying power burned into our memories: It shares many physical properties with the huge clouds of powder and ash produced by the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in The initial surge of the Avellino eruption, especially in the zones closest to Vesuvius, was instantly lethal.
The entire countryside surrounding Vesuvius was covered by foot upon foot of this powder, 65 feet 20 meters deep at a distance of three miles five kilometers from the crater to about ten inches 25 centimeters thick at a distance of 15 miles 24 kilometers. Eight inches 20 centimeters of ash is enough to cause modern roofs to collapse. The sizzling temperature of a Vesuvian surge has emerged as a key factor in explaining what happened at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the next great eruption, 1, years later.
In a grim bit of forensic paleoanthropology, Petrone and Mastrolorenzo reconstructed a parting picture of the victims huddled inside fornici 5, 10, and The heat would have boiled their brain tissue, which would then have burst out in small, scalding explosions that left blue-black burn marks on the bone. Moisture from vaporized flesh and blood combined with volcanic ash in the surge to create a protective, plasterlike material that preserved the bones, and from the posture of the skeletons they could determine that victims in the fornici died instantly.
Petrone keeps samples of the bones, along with the San Paolo Bel Sito skeletons, in several large shopping bags in his office. The pyroclastic surge is just the first part of the one-two punch delivered by the collapse of a plinian column.
When the vast amount of solid ash and debris mixes with steam fed by underground aquifers, a violent microclimate of pitched thunderstorms and torrential rains occurs, producing great mudflows. Ash falling into rivers creates more mudflows, known as lahars, that fill river valleys long after the eruption is over. Blast, fallout, column collapse, surge, flow: In this classic sequence of plinian fury, the Avellino eruption disfigured the plain of Campania as rudely as if the gods had scraped, gouged, and reshaped the landscape with a giant trowel.
The pattern of its deposits, the swirl of its volcanic signature in layers thick and thin, has allowed volcanologists to conclude that Vesuvius unleashed at least six cycles of pyroclastic surge and flow in that single eruption—six bursts of searing winds followed by six rampaging rivers of mud—that destroyed everything within about nine miles 14 kilometers of the volcano.
The immediate cataclysm probably lasted less than 24 hours, but it turned an idyllic landscape into a monochromatic desert, uninhabitable for years.
The road that snakes up from the Gulf of Naples to the summit of Vesuvius reveals one more way a human being can perish on the slopes of this volcano: getting hit by one of the countless tour buses careening around the tight turns along the route from Ercolano to the 4,foot 1, meters summit. Long gone are the days when brawny Neapolitan youths hoisted chairs bearing celebrities like Goethe and lugged them up the steep path to what the German writer memorably called "this peak of hell which towers up in the middle of paradise.
After buying your ticket the top of the volcano is now part of a national park , you hike along a path zigzagging over the rusty, iron-rich cinders of the cone. And finally, you arrive at the rim of the crater, where the view on a clear day takes in everything from Capri and the Sorrentine Peninsula to the south, to modern-day Naples to the northwest, to Pompeii and Herculaneum, victims of the geophysical power momentarily contained beneath your feet. After an enormous sub-plinian eruption in , Vesuvius has adopted a more benign personality.
It produced copious streams of lava during frequent eruptions in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries when Mastrolorenzo was a child, his grandmother used to describe the time his grandfather swept ash and cinders off roofs in Naples following an event in But since its last eruption in , the conduit has been plugged, and no one younger than 63 years of age has experienced an eruption. The occasional reminders that the volcano is still active produce a complex state of philosophical denial among people who live on or near Vesuvius.
They tend to pooh-pooh the danger and, perhaps more than in many other parts of Italy, live for the moment in a gracefully fatalistic way. Few people spend more waking hours, day in and day out, in close proximity to Vesuvius than Gennaro Cardoncello, a stolid and friendly young man who tends the last outpost of commerce on the crater rim.
With that sloe-eyed look of indifference that has been elevated to performance art in Naples and environs, Cardoncello shrugged his shoulders and changed the subject, producing a bottle of Lacryma Cristi, the local white wine whose grapes draw on Vesuvius's rich soil to produce their intense taste. Streams of tourists clamber up the steep path to the crater, oohing at the postcard-perfect vistas in every direction, aahing as they peer down from the rim of the crater feet meters to the floor, where several fumaroles barely manage to etch the air with their noxious breath.
Few of these volca-tourists pause to think about the vast reservoir of molten rock about six miles ten kilometers below or contemplate the curving remnant of the larger, more ancient Monte Somma crater that funnels the view—and more important, would funnel any future pyroclastic surges—in a northwesterly direction toward metropolitan Naples. When Vesuvius had its last plinian eruption, the plain below was inhabited by thousands of sybaritic Romans; now it is inhabited by upwards of one million people in Naples alone, and hundreds of thousands more in the towns between the city and the crater.
On a clear day, with even modest binoculars, it is possible to stand on the crater rim and make out the massive 13th-century Angevin fortress in downtown Naples known as Maschio Angioino. Also known as Castel Nuovo, it is where the French Angevin monarchy first settled, and it marks the geographic and, in some ways, the emotional heart of the city.
Several days after I visited the summit, Mastrolorenzo led me deep into the fortress's foundation, two floors beneath the elegant chamber where until recently the Naples City Council held its weekly meetings.
Luckily for some inhabitants, this was a blessing in disguise since many of them had to leave the city and eventually settled in towns further away from the volcano. It rained elephants…ok, not quite When the volcano began to erupt almost years ago, it shot tons of volcanic debris into the air, which then rained down upon the surrounding towns.
To give you an idea of how much debris was scattered, it was the equivalent of , elephants per second! Over in 24 hours At about midday on August 24th in the year 79, Mount Vesuvius began to erupt. The first stage of eruption featured a blast that sent pumice stones thousands of feet into the air. These stones then fell like rain upon the surrounding towns, steadily burying them for roughly 5 hours. As the rocks continued to fall, they grew in size, and for the next few hours, they caused buildings and structures to collapse.
The second stage of the eruption occurred about 17 hours later when a ferocious pyroclastic flow poured from the volcano, covering Pompeii and Herculaneum in a thick layer of smouldering debris in a matter of minutes. The dust over the towns and cities began to settle after a day of relentless volcanic bombardment. Brilliantly preserved until now The remains of Pompeii lay in an impressive state of preservation for over 1, years until they were uncovered in the 18th-century.
Since their excavation, human interference and natural weathering have led to their decline. Archaeologists are concerned for the future preservation of the site and Pompeii is recognised by the World Monuments Fund; an organisation dedicated to the preservation of historic architecture.
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