Amid Its Volcanic Eruption, Pompeii Was Also Rocked by an Earthquake, Study Suggests

When disaster struck Pompeii in 79 C.E., people didn’t die from just the infamous volcanic eruption—some perished in an earthquake at the same time. A study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science examined two people’s skeletal remains preserved at the site and found they were crushed when an earthquake caused a building to collapse.

Raffaello Cioni, a volcanologist at the University of Florence in Italy who did not contribute to the findings, tells the Washington Post’s Carolyn Y. Johnson that the analysis is “really accurate and convincing.”

“The effects of seismicity have been speculated by past scholars, but no factual evidence has been reported before our study,” Domenico Sparice, a co-author of the study and a volcanologist at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy, says to the New York Times’ Jordan Pearson.

At the start of Mount Vesuvius’ 79 C.E. eruption, it showered the city of Pompeii with glassy rock, trapping people under collapsing roofs. Next, avalanches of rock, gas and ash surged down the mountainside and buried the city. The eruption killed about 2,000 people in Pompeii alone and some 16,000 in total, including those in neighboring towns and villages.

Now, researchers propose the earthquake occurred between these two phases of the eruption, killing residents before the volcanic outflow blanketed everything.

“During the shaking, many people tried to escape their shelters,” Sparice says to Science’s Alex Epshtein. “But they were likely hit by the rapid arrival of pyroclastic currents. There was no lifesaving choice.”

Beyond archaeological excavations of the city preserved in ash, researchers have learned about the eruption from letters written by Pliny the Younger, a Roman author who watched it unfold from a distance. His account of the event says seismic activity accompanied the eruption, but modern scholars had been unable to find evidence of damage caused by earthquakes at the same time as the volcanic activity in Pompeii.

During a recent excavation in the central part of the city, scientists found the remains of two people in a collapsed building. To uncover exactly what happened to them, the researchers pulled together an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, volcanologists and anthropologists. They studied the building’s construction, the layers of remains from the eruption, how the wall was displaced and the fractures in the skeletal remains.

They determined that the collapse of the building seemed to be caused by seismic shocks, and that the injuries on the dead bodies suggested they had been crushed in a manner similar to what’s seen in victims of modern earthquakes.

The people died in a crouched position, suggesting an earthquake was the cause—if they had died more slowly of asphyxiation during an eruption, they would have been in a more relaxed position, Carla Bottari, an archaeoseismologist from Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology who did not contribute to the findings, says to Science.

The work is “amazing” and shows the benefit of interdisciplinary research, Kevin Dicus, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon who was not involved in the study, tells the New York Times.

“The evidence is always there—it just takes new questions, and new eyes, to look for it,” he adds. “Archaeology shouldn’t be an entirely insular profession.”

Following this paper, researchers could further investigate the role seismic activity played in the ancient city’s doomsday, the study authors write.

“Our study provides an updated perspective of the destruction of Pompeii,” Sparice tells Inverse’s Elana Spivack.

Will Sullivan | | READ MORE

Will Sullivan is a science writer based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in Inside Science and NOVA Next.