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The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD was one of the most catastrophic and infamous volcanic eruptions in European history. Historians have learned about the eruption from the eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger, a Roman administrator and poet.〔 Mount Vesuvius spewed a deadly cloud of volcanic gas, stones, and ash to a height of , ejecting molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy of the Hiroshima bombing. Several Roman settlements were obliterated and buried underneath massive pyroclastic surges and ashfall deposits, the most well known being Pompeii and Herculaneum.〔 The number of deaths is difficult to evaluate. The remains of about 1500 people have been found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, but it is not known whether they represent a small or a large part of the overall deaths. ==Precursors and foreshocks== The AD 79 eruption was preceded by a powerful earthquake seventeen years beforehand on February 5, AD 62, which caused widespread destruction around the Bay of Naples, and particularly to Pompeii. Some of the damage had still not been repaired when the volcano erupted.〔 The deaths of 600 sheep from "tainted air" in the vicinity of Pompeii reported by Seneca the Younger leads Haraldur Sigurdsson to compare them to similar deaths of sheep in Iceland from pools of volcanic carbon dioxide and to speculate that the earthquake of 62 was related to new activity by Mount Vesuvius.〔 on Seneca the Younger, ''Natural Questions'', 6.1, 6.27.〕 Another smaller earthquake took place in AD 64; it was recorded by Suetonius in his biography of Nero, and by Tacitus in ''Annales'' because it took place while Nero was in Naples performing for the first time in a public theatre. Suetonius recorded that the emperor continued singing through the earthquake until he had finished his song, while Tacitus wrote that the theatre collapsed shortly after being evacuated. The Romans grew accustomed to minor earth tremors in the region; the writer Pliny the Younger wrote that they "were not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania". Small earthquakes started taking place on 20 August 79, becoming more frequent over the next four days, but the warnings were not recognized.〔The dates of the earthquakes and of the eruption are contingent on a final determination of the time of year, but there is no reason to change the relative sequence.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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