EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT POMPEII

Dr Sophie Hay answers key questions about the doomed Roman city and the ongoing efforts to understand the lives of its residents

- CHARLOTTE HODGMAN

Q: Do we know how and when Pompeii was destroyed?

A: The only eyewitness account of the eruption that we have comes from Pliny the Younger (the nephew of naturalist and naval commander Pliny the Elder), via letters that he wrote 17 years after the disaster, describing the eruption of Vesuvius. And it is from him that we get a timeline of what happened during those fateful days.

There had been earth tremors in the days leading up to the eruption, but no one seems to have paid much attention to them. Vesuvius had last erupted in something like 1600 BC, so when it emitted a huge plume of ash and volcanic debris into the sky, no one had any idea what was happening. Over the next 18 hours or so, pumice stones rained down from the cloud, filling the streets and houses, and by the next morning, the huge column of ash had collapsed, and incredibly fast-moving clouds of stone and ash and gases (now known as pyroclastic surges) started racing down the sides of Vesuvius at speeds of 200mph and temperatures of 300°C. Anyone who hadn't left Pompeii by that point would have had no hope of survival, and it is this that finally buried and destroyed the city.