660-pound flying stone killed a man in Pompeii ("A formidable stone block, perhaps a door jamb")
My apologies if you already posted this story.
Then I bet he was dead before the rock hit him.
"But during the surge "temperatures outdoors—and indoors—rose up to 300°C [570°F] and more, enough to kill hundreds of people in a fraction of a second," said Mastrolorenzo, who led the study, published in the June 2010 issue of the journal PLoS ONE." link
Was he just a stone’s throw away from the volcano?
It has, but we can never have too many. :^)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3658985/posts
Pompeii was out of range of the pyroclastic flows, and was mostly just buried in circa ten meters depth of ash.
Rocks as seen in the photo were however hurled from the caldera, and a steady hail of pebble struck every structure and anyone or anything moving on the streets.
Just to make the whole day a crap sandwich, there was also a wave or two of poison gases that rolled down the slopes of Vesuvius.
Herculaneum was on the slopes of the volcano and buried under pyroclastic flows. This had the effect of preserving many or perhaps most of the upper storeys of structures in that town. One hazard encountered by the past couple hundred years’ worth of excavators has been that the poisonous gases have been preserved in tiny pores inside the pyroclastic flows after they cooled and hardened into stone.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3659159/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/pompeii/index
