What happened to the city of Pompeii?
Pompeii's Buried Day
What happened to the city of Pompeii?
Nearly two thousand years ago, there was a Roman city called Pompeii. It sat right next to a mountain — Mount Vesuvius — which had been quiet and grassy for as long as anyone could remember. The people of Pompeii had no idea their peaceful neighbor was actually a volcano.
On August 24th in the year 79, Vesuvius woke up. The mountain exploded, shooting a column of ash and rock fifteen miles straight into the sky — higher than airplanes fly today. The eruption was so powerful that it threw out a billion tons of material in just a few hours.
