In A.D. 79, a massive volcano in southern Italy suddenly, explosively awoke, leading to one of the ancient world’s deadliest natural disasters. Ash and gas from the eruption killed at least 1,500 people in the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Now, a new analysis suggests that powerful earthquakes concurrent with the eruption may have been yet another killer, volcanologist Domenico Sparice of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Naples and colleagues report July 17 in Frontiers in Earth Science.
Previous excavations of Pompeii have revealed residents fully encased in ash, their preserved bodies telling a powerful tale of a swift, scalding end. In Herculaneum, people that
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