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Plate Tectonics In Pompeii

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Plate tectonics can cause a big impact on humans and could possibly shift its course and our knowledge of the past. This quarter we have been studied plate tonics in the quarter. Pompeii was a city that was affected by plate tonics, its movement caused a massive eruption with terrible consequences. The earth is a massive sphere composed of different layers. The layers above the surface are gas, the surface is liquid and solid, but deep below it’s a dense liquid that moves around. The liquids inside the earth move because as the center is heated the material in it is hot and so its density is reduced. Materials with a lower density tend to rise up as materials with higher densities lower, this causes all the materials inside of the earth to …show more content…

Mount Vesuvius is a composite volcano because its eruptions vary often from pyroclastic material to lava flows. It can be explosive like its most famous eruption in August 24, 79 A.D. which caused ash falls, volcanic impact, and mudflows onto Pompeii and Herculaneum, or nonexplosive like in May 1, 1855 which a lava flow invades Massa and San Sebastiano. Mount Vesuvius stands as high as 4190 feet. It's composed of a volcanic cone, named Gran Cono, inside a summit caldera, called Mount …show more content…

The surrounding areas such as the river itself and the surrounding fertile volcanic soil were great appeals for the settlers since their main income and productions were olives and grapes. The first settlers didn’t know that where they settled had been site for ancient volcanic eruptions, so they assumed that now the mountain was safe. Ancient greek history tells the story of Hercules, a brave and strong semi god who fought the giants in that landscape. On the morning of 24th of August a tremendous bang signalled that the magma that had been building over the last thousand years had finally burst through the crater of Vesuvius. Fire and smoke bellowed from the volcano. At this point, it may have seemed that the mountain was doing nothing more than offering a harmless pyrotechnic display but at midday an even bigger explosion blew off the entire cone of Vesuvius and a massive mushroom cloud of pumice particles rose 27 miles (43 Km) into the sky. The power of the explosion has been calculated as 100,000 times greater than the nuclear bomb which devastated Hiroshima in 1945 CE. The ash that started to rain down on Pompeii was light in weight but the density was such that within minutes everything was covered in centimetres of it. People tried to flee the town or sought shelter where they could and those without shelter tried desperately to keep themselves above the shifting layers of volcanic

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