Mount Vesuvius consists of a large cone that is partially encircled by a larger, deeper cone, which is the remains of an ancient somma volcano that has erupted and collapsed over time. Mount Vesuvius is located on Italy’s west coast and overlooks the Bay and city of Naples. Vesuvius stands about 4000 ft above sea level, and is part of the Companian volcanic arc, which is a line of volcanoes that formed over a subduction zone created by the convergence of the African and Eurasian plates (Ball, 2016). Vesuvius is classed as a stratovolcano because its eruptions are typically explosive and violent in nature, and are accompanied by pyroclastic flows. These flows contain a high-density mix of hot lava blocks, pumice, ash and volcanic gas. They move at very high speed down volcanic slopes and destroy everything in their path. Vesuvius has experienced eight major eruptions in the last 17,000 years, but none is more notes worthy than the eruption of 79AD. This eruption buried the nearby city of Pompeii and the town of Herculaneum and killed almost everything in its violent …show more content…
The eruption lasted for two weeks and subsided. Mount Vesuvius has been dormant since 1944, but scientists believe this to be short lived. Mount Vesuvius now has over 600,000 people living within the “death” zones of an eruption. The Italians refer to the 18 towns that surround Vesuvius as the “Red Zone” and have put many precautions in place to ensure they have ample time to evacuate when, not if, Vesuvius erupts again. Conger (2016) stated that because of the imminent and unpredictable threat, the Italian government has devised an evacuation plan to clear out the red zone 72 hours ahead of an impending eruption. The government is monitoring seismic activity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to stay ahead of the potential catastrophic event. The nearby city of Naples has over 3 million in population, and if Vesuvius has an eruption larger than that of 79AD, all of these lives could be at