February 6, 2020 • 45 mins
In the year 79 CE, the Italian volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted with with the thermal energy of 100,000 atomic bombs. Ashen destruction rained down on Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe explore this terrifying episode in history and what we can learn from it.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Soon afterwards, the cloud began to descend and cover the sea.
It had already surrounded and concealed the island of Capri
and the promontory of mycene Him. My mother begged me
to leave her and escape as best I could, but
I absolutely refused, taking her by the hand and making
her to hurry along with me. Ash was already falling
(00:24):
by now, though in no great quantity. Then I turned
and saw a thick black cloud advancing over the land
behind us like a flood. Let us leave the road
while we can still see, I said, But we will
be knocked down and trampled by the crowd. We had
scarcely sat down when darkness came upon us. Not such
as we have when the sky is cloudy or when
(00:45):
there is no moon, but that of a room when
it is shut up and all the lamps put out
(01:10):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. A production of
I Heart Radios has to work. Hey, welcome to stuff
to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamp and
I'm Joe McCormick. And if you know your ancient Roman literature,
you might have guessed from that opening that today we're
gonna be talking about the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Uh.
(01:33):
This is something that I've wanted to do an episode
on for a long time, mainly because I love some
of the ancient Roman original documents that we're going to
be reading from today that they are like so crisp
as a descriptive source of this ancient catastrophe that happened
in the year seventy nine. Yeah, this is a This
is a topic I'm excited to get into as well
(01:55):
because I definitely have strong childhood memories of of course
being fascinated with volcanoes. Volcanoes along with dinosaurs are just
part of being a child. But then also I remember
having a national copy of National Geographic that had all
these beautiful, haunting photographs of the remnants of Pompeii, Uh,
(02:15):
the the victims of Vesuvius. Yeah, it's funny you should
bring up dinosaurs, because I think this was sort of
in the back of my mind and I hadn't brought
it to the front until you said that there's a
weird way that in a lot of the paleo art
that I grew up with as a child. I think
we've actually mentioned this on the show before, that dinosaurs
are often depicted with volcanoes currently erupting in the background.
(02:38):
Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, absolutely, you
see it all the time. And the thing is, sometimes
I feel like the artists, the paleo artist in question,
is definitely trying to get something across, like this is
a region in which they were volcanic eruptions, or perhaps
they're discussing the role of volcanoes, the role they may
have possibly played according to various theories regarding extinction events.
(03:01):
But other times I think it's this just idea of
this was this primal dangerous age in which the earth
is opening up, monsters are walking about, feasting on each other.
It's just that the world is alive with danger. I
think that's correct. But I think there's also something to
the thing you mentioned first, like the idea that volcanoes
(03:22):
are sometimes invoked as one of the explanatory mechanisms for
some of the extinction events that killed lots of the dinosaurs,
And because they're thought of this way, we think about
dinosaurs often, like as if we we mainly think of
them in like the last moments before they were wiped
from the face of the earth. That's like the defining
time of their existence. They're frozen and amber, uh in
(03:46):
the moment right before their doom. And in a strange way,
that is quite literally the case about the settlements surrounding
Mount Vesuvius. Absolutely. I mean, that's one of the things
about Pompei is it is it allows us to to
look into the path in ways that the remains of
other ancient cities do not. Yeah, it's for that reason
that at the same time that it's very grim to
(04:08):
look at, it's also kind of magical. Uh. So we're
gonna be talking about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. This
this catastrophe in the year seventy nine CE that obliterated
several Roman settlements around the Bay of Naples, including the
city of Pompeii and the town of Herculaneum. And historians
studying the subject are very lucky because we actually have
(04:29):
access to historical documents describing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius
in seventy nine in extreme detail. Specifically, this is a
pair of letters written by the first century Roman politician
and author Plenty the Younger, who is in fact the
nephew of the great Roman author and encyclopedist Plenty the elder,
(04:50):
whose natural history we reference on the show all the
time for insights on what the ancient Romans thought they
knew about everything from sea monsters to the culinary virtues
of lead. That's right, I feel it. Scarcely a month
goes by that we don't reference plenty of the Elder.
So it's it's it's great and of course bitter sweet
to meet up with him again here, right, because this,
(05:11):
of course is the end of the story of plenty
of the Elder. He spent a lifetime collecting all of
this knowledge and pseudo knowledge about the world. But we've
never discussed before how plenty of the Elder died. It
was the mountain that killed him. So about these letters
describing the event. Sometime early in the second century CE,
I think I've seen it placed, maybe around the year
one oh four, one oh five, something like that. Around
(05:34):
this time, plenty Of the Younger wrote two letters to
the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus to give his firsthand account
of the eruption and to explain the ultimate fate of
his uncle. Now, these two letters are famous for their
vivid description of the events, and so we wanted to
put you on the ground during the eruption of Vesuvius.
(05:54):
By reading some selections from these letters. Uh, these will
come from a couple of different England translations that you
can easily find online. I sort of made a composite
out of two different translations, trying to take some of
the best parts from each one. One is from a
book called Volcanoes of Europe from Dunedin Academic Press from
seventeen by Degal Jeram Alwyn Scarth and Jean Claude Tangai.
(06:19):
And then there's another widely used English translation by William Melmouth.
So those two came together to to create what you're
about to hear. Yes, these are are typically described as
the the oldest detailed accounts, detailed firsthand accounts of a
volcanic eruption. That's not to say that volcanic eruptions were
(06:39):
not known to to do ancient people's They were known,
um and then we have mentioned of them popping out.
There's even I read there's there's an argument that Virgils
mention of an eruption of Mount Etna in the in
Needed was actually generated via firsthand observation, But even that
(07:00):
would not be the level of detail that we're discussing here, right,
I have not found any evidence of a description of
a volcanic eruption in in literary history older than Plenty's
description here that contains nearly anywhere close to the amount
of detail we get right, certainly nothing that has survived,
and probably because a lot of the people who might
(07:21):
have been in a position to write such an account
themselves did not survive. Uh So, Plenty the Younger begins
his first letter by praising Tacitus's skills as a writer
of history and talking about his uncle, Plenty of the Elder,
and he he says, basically, you know, my uncle died
in a misfortune, but there's a chance to redeem his legacy,
(07:41):
because if you put him in your in your history,
if his name becomes associated with the eruption of Vesuvius,
it will render his name immortal. Uh So, I'm going
to pick up after that section of of introduction and
just read from Plenty's account within his first letter. At
the time of the great eruption, my uncle Plenty was
with the fleet under his command at mycene him on
(08:04):
the August about one in the afternoon. My mother desired
him to observe a cloud which appeared of a very
unusual size and shape. He had just taken a turn
in the sun, and after bathing himself in cold water
and making a light luncheon, he had gone back to
his books. He immediately arose and went out upon a promontory,
(08:25):
from whence he might get a better site of this
very uncommon appearance. From that distance, it was not clear
from which mountain the cloud was rising, although it was
found afterwards to be vesuvious. The cloud could best be
described as more like an umbrella pine than any other tree,
for it rose high up like a trunk, and then
divided into branches. I imagined that this was because it
(08:48):
was thrust up by the initial blast until its power weakened,
and it was left unsupported and spread out sideways under
its own weight. Sometimes it looked light colored, sometimes it
looked modeled and dirty, with the earth and cinders it
had carried up. This phenomenon seemed to a man of
such learning and research as my uncle, extraordinary and worth
(09:09):
further looking into. He ordered a light vessel to be
got ready and gave me leave if I liked it
to accompany him. I said, I had rather go on
with my work, and it so happened. He had himself
given me something to ride out. As he was coming
out of the house, he received a note from Retina,
the wife of Tascus, who was in the utmost alarm
(09:31):
at the immediate danger which threatened her for her villa.
Lying at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. There was no
way of escape but by boat. She was terrified by
the threatening danger and begged him to rescue her. He's
changed his plan at once, and what he had started
in a spirit of scientific curiosity, he ended as a hero.
(09:51):
You know. At this point I always stopped and I wonder, like,
how did he get the note? I imagine it must
have come to him across the water, right that maybe
in a smaller boat she was able to send a
noe doubt and to ask him to come back with
larger boats that she and her family could escape on.
I imagine, I mean, the only ways it would be
that or by some manner of bird. Yeah, as long
as we're interjecting, I want to remind everyone here that
(10:14):
that Plenty of the Elder would have been about fifty
six years old at this point. If you're trying to
picture him in your head, and perhaps cast Um an
actor in the role. Yes, and the younger Plenty also
says of his uncle that he was that he was
like brave and stout, But he he also says, he
was a quite corpulent man, so like he wasn't necessarily,
you know, fit as a fiddle to be running out
(10:36):
into danger. But anyway, to go back to the account,
uh Plenty continues, he ordered the galleys to be put
to sea, and he went himself on board with an
intention of assisting not only Rectina, but the several other
towns which lay thickly strewn along that beautiful coast, hastening
then to the place from whence others fled with the
utmost terror. He steered his course direct to the point
(10:58):
of danger, and so much calmness and presence of mind
as to be able to make and dictate his observations
upon the motion and all the phenomena of that dreadful scene.
So he's taken notes as he goes. He was now
so close to the mountain that the cinders, which grew
thicker and hotter the nearer he approached, fell into the ships,
together with pumice stones and black pieces of burning rocks
(11:22):
shattered by the fire. They were in danger too, not
only of being a ground by the sudden retreat of
the sea, but also from the vast fragments which rolled
down from the mountain and obstructed all the shore. Can
you imagine that being out on a boat and so
like the sea is first of all pulling away from
the shore as you're trying to get into the shore
(11:43):
to rescue people from the villas along the shoreline, So
the seas retreating, and then also stuff from the mountain
is now coming down and making its way into the water, right,
I mean, it must have been like approaching a shore
upon which there was a battle. Only instead of two
human force is engaged in battle, it is a battle
between civilization and the elements of the earth itself. Unreal.
(12:06):
He continues. Here he stopped to consider whether he should
turn back, for the pilot was advising retreat. Fortune favors
the brave, he said, Steer to where Pomponius is from.
Ponianus lived at Testavia, a town across the Bay of Naples,
which was not yet in danger, but would be threatened
if the eruption spread. Pomponianus had already put his belongings
(12:31):
into a boat to escape as soon as the contrary
onshore wind changed, The wind, of course, was fully in
my uncle's favor, and quickly brought his boat to Stabia.
My uncle calmed and encouraged his terrified friend the more
effectually to soothe his fears by seeming unconcerned himself. He
ordered the drawing of a hot bath, and then, after
(12:51):
having bathed, sat down to supper with great cheerfulness, or
at least with every appearance of it, which is just
as brave. Is that? Just as I guess? So, Yeah,
if you're like trying to calm other people even though
you are yourself scared, Yeah, I mean, if there's only
so much you can do, calmness is going to help
and help to maintain a a proper retreat. I mean,
(13:14):
I guess to a certain extent one could again apply
to military metaphor here, you know, and the military backgrounds
of individuals involved. Yeah, So I guess what they're saying
here is that he's stuck at the house until the
winds change and they can get out by water, and
trying to encourage people not to panic while they're while
they're there, so plenty continues. Meanwhile, tall broad flames blazed
(13:36):
from several places on Vesuvious and glared out through the
darkness of the night. But my uncle, in order to
soothe the apprehensions of his friend, assured him it was
only the burning of the villages which the country people
had abandoned to the flames. After this he retired to rest,
and it is most certain that he was so little
disquieted as to fall into a sound sleep, for his breathing,
(13:58):
which on account of his corpulence, was rather heavy and sonorous,
was heard by the attendants outside his door. But eventually
the courtyard outside began to fill with so much ash
and pummice that if he had stayed in his room,
he would never have been able to get out. So
he was awakened, and he went to Pompony Inis and
the rest of the company, who had stayed up all
(14:19):
night and were feeling too anxious to think of going
to bed. They consulted together whether it would be most
prudent to trust to the houses, which now rocked from
side to side with frequent and violent concussions, as though
shaken from their very foundations, or fly to the open fields,
where the stones and cinders, though light and porous, fell
(14:39):
in large showers and threatened destruction. In this choice of dangers,
they resolved for the fields, a resolution which, while the
rest of the company were hurried into by their fears,
my uncle embraced upon cool and deliberate consideration. They went
out then having pillows tied upon their heads with napkins,
for this was their whole defense against the storm of
(15:01):
stones that fell around them. And I have to admit
that is that is a slightly comical mental image. Yes,
it is put in your head. Well it's it's like
both at the same time. It's like funny, but it's
also so grim and so real, Like you can imagine like, Okay,
so the house you're you're afraid the house is going
to collapse. You've got to get away from the house.
But outside the house, stuff is, rocks are falling from
(15:22):
the sky. So what do you do? You know, like
it's not safe to be under a roof. So like
they literally were like, okay, we've got to improvise helmets, right, yeah,
So yeah, I agree, it is it is both a
little bit comic but also terrifying. I mean, this whole
situation is terrifying. And I think one thing to keep
in mind too, is we read this account is again
thinking about to what extent Plenty is trying to manage
(15:45):
evacuation and to to to manage their response, a calm
response to this catastrophe that's taking place, because that is
going to be vital not only did this scenario, but
to other scenarios and even future scenarios regarding the clash
of human civilization and volcanic activity. Yes. Uh, And you
say he's having to manage in evacuation, he's not only
(16:07):
having to do that, he's having to improvise management of
an evacuation because they don't know what the best practices are.
So anyway goes on to the conclusion of the letter here.
So they've gone out with the pillows tied to their heads,
and then Plenty of the younger says it was now
daylight everywhere else, but they're a deeper darkness prevailed than
in the thickest night, and they were forced to light
(16:27):
their torches and lamps. My uncle went down to the
shore to see if there was any chance of escape
by sea, but the waves were still far too high.
There my uncle, laying himself down upon a sail cloth
which was spread for him, called twice for some cold water,
which he drank. Then immediately the flames, preceded by a
strong whift of sulfur, dispersed the rest of the party
(16:50):
and obliged him to rise. He raised himself up with
the assistance of his two servants, and instantly fell down dead, suffocated,
as I conjecture, by gross and noxious vapor, having always
had a weak throat which was often inflamed as soon
as it was light again, which was not till the
third day after this melancholy accident. His body was found
(17:11):
entire and without any marks of violence upon it, in
the dress in which he fell, and looking more like
a man asleep than dead. So plenty of the elder
dies here on the shore, but not everybody in his
party does, because, of course, like the servants and friends,
are later able to report back to plenty of the
younger what happened to his uncle right, and and of
course plenty of the younger mentions his his ailing lungs
(17:35):
as being a possible reason that he succumbed to these fumes.
It has also been hypothesized that he could have actually
even though by all appearances it might have had something
to do with the fumes it also could have simply
been a stroke or heart attack. Yeah, I mean, obviously
this is a high stress, high exertion situation, um, and
(17:55):
he wasn't a young man anymore. But so Plenty then
ends his letter by saying he witnessed a lot of
other stuff, but he didn't include it in the letter
because Tacitus originally had only asked how his uncle had died.
And apparently Tacitus wrote back and wanted to know more.
He wanted to know details about what the younger Plenty
and his mother had encountered when they stayed behind it
(18:16):
Mycene him. And that makes for the content of the
second letter. So maybe we should take a break, and
then when we come back we can read from plenty
second letter about the eruption. Than alright, we're back. So
before the break we were discussing how Plenty the elder died,
and now we are essentially going to explore how Plenty
(18:37):
of the younger lived. Yes, so now remember in the
first letter, Plenty of the younger and his mother stayed
behind at Mycene him while the elder took the fleet
out to help people who were further along the shore.
And so plenty picks up his narrative like this. He says,
after my uncle left us, I studied, dined, and went
to bed, but slept only fitfully. We had had earth
(18:58):
tremors for several days, which were not especially alarming because
they happened so often in Campania. But that night they
were so violent that everything felt as if it were
being shaken and turned over. My mother came hurrying to
my room, and we sat together in the forecourt facing
the sea. As I was at that time but eighteen
years of age. I know not whether I should call
(19:19):
my behavior in this dangerous juncture courage or folly. But
I looked up to Livy and amused myself with turning
over that author and even making extracts from him, as
if I had been perfectly at my leisure. Though it
was now morning, the light was still exceedingly faint and doubtful,
The buildings around were already tottering, and we would have
(19:41):
been in danger in our confined space if our house
had fallen down. This made us decide to leave town.
We were chased after by a panic stricken crowd that
chose to follow someone else's judgment rather than decide anything
for themselves. I love that detail that he's like he's
trying to act like he's not afraid, so he's just
going on with his studies. Is like, I'll just keep
(20:01):
reading Livy and make some notes. And then again this
is terrifying scene of like every no one knows what
to do, and so like, of course they're going to
follow uh cliny here, just like like somebody who looks
like they know what needs to be done, it knows
no where they need to go. They're going to fall
in behind them. We Also, he was the of a
(20:22):
family of military command, so his uncle would have been
known as the commander of the fleet there at the bay.
So I think if the relatives of the commanders suddenly
start leaving town, everybody is going to see that and
be like, we probably need to get out to Yeah,
I would. I would say, you know, the comeback here
would be of course we're following you and not thinking
for ourselves. You're the military, like you're you're a are
(20:45):
you're the one to follow you. We're not going to
trust your own judgment here you are the Navy. But again,
this would not have been a time when people had
like a list of safety procedures they could look up
for a volcanic eruption. I mean you, you have no precedent,
You have no idea what to do, right, because as
will as we'll discuss as we get into this topic more.
This volcano had not erupted in quite a while. It
(21:07):
had at the very least been centuries. Yeah. Now Plenty
picks up of this narrative. He says, being at a
convenient distance from the houses, we stood still in the
midst of a most dangerous and dreadful scene. The carriages
we had ordered began to lurch to and fro, although
the ground was flat, and we could not keep them still,
even when we wedged their wheels with stones. Then we
(21:29):
saw the sea sucked back, apparently by a convulsion of
the earth, and many sea creatures were left stranded on
the dry sand. From the other direction, over the land,
a dreadful black cloud was torn by gushing flames and
great tongues of fire, like much magnified lightning. Soon afterwards,
the cloud began to descend and cover the sea it
(21:52):
had already surrounded and concealed the island of Capri and
the promontory of my Sine Him, my mother begged me
to leave her and escape as best I could, but
I absolutely refused, taking her by the hand and making
her to hurry along with me. Ash was already falling
by now, though in no great quantity. Then I turned
and saw a thick black cloud advancing over the land
(22:14):
behind us like a flood. Let us leave the road
while we still can see, I said, or we will
be knocked down and trampled by the crowd. We had
scarcely sat down when darkness came upon us, Not such
as we have when the sky is cloudy or when
there is no moon, but that of a room when
it is shut up and all the lamps put out.
Can you imagine that? So this is daytime now, but
(22:36):
the it is not only dark like a night, it
is darker than night. Yeah, this is this is the
darkness at noon type situation exactly. So he goes on
to describe the terror of the scene. He says, you
might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children,
and the shouts of men, some calling for their children,
others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking
(22:57):
to recognize each other by the voices that were led.
One lamenting his own fate, another that of his family,
Some praying to die from the very fear of dying,
some lifting their hands to the gods. But the greater
part convinced that there were now no gods at all,
and that the final, endless night of which we had
heard had come upon the world. Among these there were
(23:20):
some who augmented the real terrors by others imaginary or
willfully invented. I remember some who declared that one part
of my snum had fallen, that another was on fire.
It was false, but they found people to believe them.
So just chaos is reigning, misinformation is flying. The world
is dark and full of terror. The day is dark
(23:42):
and full of terrors. All right, he continues, It now
grew rather lighter, which we imagined to be the forerunner
of an approaching burst of flames, as in truth it
was rather than the return of day. However, the fire
fell at a distance from us. Then again we were
inst in a thick darkness, and a heavy shower of
(24:02):
ashes rained upon us, which we were obliged every now
and then to stand up to shake off. Otherwise we
should have been crushed and buried in the heap. I
matt it might have boasted that during all this scene
of horror, not a sigh or expression of fear escaped me.
But in truth my support was grounded in that miserable
though mighty consolation that all mankind were involved in the
(24:25):
same calamity, and that I was perishing with the world itself.
That line has haunted me ever since I first read it.
That he says he's not afraid because he knew it
wasn't just him dying, it was the end of the
entire world. And finally he concludes the letters, saying, at
last the darkness paled into smoke or cloud, and the
(24:47):
real daylight returned, But the sun shone with a lurid light,
as during an eclipse. Every object that presented itself to
our weakened eyes seemed to change, being covered deep with
ashes as with snow. We returned to mycene Him, where
we refreshed ourselves as well as we could, and passed
an anxious night between hope and fear, though indeed with
(25:10):
a much larger share of the latter, for the earthquake
still continued, while many frenzied persons ran up and down,
heightening their own and their friends calamities. By terrible predictions. So,
first of all, I think those letters are just amazing
literary documents. But also I wanted to say, there is
a painting that I've seen online several times that captures
(25:33):
the spirit of those letters pretty well for me. It's
called The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by the English
romantic painter John Martin. Yeah. All right, so we've presented
you with the drama of what is happening. Let's provide
a little background just about this region, about Pompeii and
some of these other cities that we were name dropping, right,
(25:55):
what was going on in the area before the seventy
nine eruption of Vesuvius. So the part of Italy immediately
surrounding Mount Vesuvius. The the larger region here is known
as Campania, which Plenty makes reference to because he says,
you know, we were used to earthquakes in Campania. It's
kind of a geologically active region. So when the little
(26:15):
earthquakes began, we weren't too worried at first, and still,
you know, until it started rocking the house back and forth. Um,
and so Campania translates into I think roughly into the
word countryside. Apparently it was once known as the Campania
Felix or the Happy countryside. And it's this region in
the southwestern part of the Italian peninsula along the Tyrannian Sea,
(26:39):
and its capital is, of course, the coastal city of
Naples or Napoly in Italian. This is where the pizza
comes from, is it? I think maybe it is a
famous variety of pizza that comes from Here's Nepolitan and Neapolitan.
I'm not sure. I don't know what the relationship between
those two works. You thinking about ice cream? Maybe, I
don't know. We'll have to get this. We'll have to
come back to it on our other show Invention. Just
(27:02):
right in and shame us. Go ahead, Okay. So today,
Campania is a highly sought after tourist destination, in large
part due to the natural beauty of its coastline, including
stretches like the famous Amalfi Coast. If you've seen these
gorgeous photos of like little antique towns nestled into the
(27:22):
steeply descending hillsides between looming cliffs, sull covered in trees
and lush greenery. This kind of stuff along the waterfront
in Italy, I think there's a very good chance that
you are looking at images of the Amalfi coast. But
it turns out that the tourism industry is not new
in Campania. Even in the first century during the Roman Empire,
(27:43):
places especially around the Bay of Naples, were extremely fashionable
as vacation resorts for the rich elite of Rome and
other capitals of the Empire. And again you just look
up pictures of this place and you instantly understand why
it is a place of of of absolutely gorgeous natural
formations and vegetation. The coastline is pristine and striking. I mean,
(28:04):
I want to go there right now. Yes, yes, looking
at a photos of this region, which which is still
a vacation destination. Like you said, it looks very inviting.
But that's not all. Of course, Campania also has a
reputation as a rich and fertile farmland, both then and now,
and it's even today. It's very densely populated. But it's
(28:25):
also a center of agricultural food production for Italy. Yes,
lots of orchards, lots of vineyards. Uh. Now, probably the
most famous point of destruction within this this sort of
broad cone of destruction from the vesuvious eruption is the
city of Pompeii. It was a city that had been
settled by seafaring Greeks almost a thousand years before, like
(28:48):
in the eighth century b C. And then for several
centuries after that was a city controlled variously by the
Greeks and the Etruscans, sometimes trading off. It only fell
under Roman control during the second century b C. E
Before the Empire. This would have been during the period
of the Roman Republic. UH. And then by seventy nine c.
Pompeii had somewhere between like ten thousand and twenty thousand inhabitants.
(29:13):
It was wealthy, it was thriving. Like other places in Campania,
Pompeii was a resort for the famous and the powerful
families of Rome, with expensive villas, bath houses, restaurants, brothels,
you know, kind of a kind of an aspen of
ancient Rome, all right. Uh. The one problem, of course,
that is that all of this was built up in
(29:33):
the region surrounding Vesuvius and uh and of course Vesuvius
at the time was slumbering, or seemed to be slumbering,
But then in seventy nine it awakens and you know
I would say it's not. We can come back to
this later if you want, but it's not necessarily just
a coincidence that like, this is a place of great
beauty and agricultural production, so it draws a lot of
(29:56):
people and just happens to be near a dangerous active volcano.
There might be some reasons that both of these things
are true. Oh yeah, I mean yeah, we can go
and touch on these facts really quickly, because first of all,
we mentioned how fertile, uh, the the area is, how
well things grow even on the slopes of Vesuvius itself,
(30:16):
and that is because of this rich volcanic soil. Yes,
and I think it's also possible to argue that some
of the geologic features that make it kind of risky
in terms of volcanic activity also contribute to the beauty
of its coastline. Absolutely. I mean the the the volcanic
activity is the the the engine that formed the land
that people are occupying, that people are growing crops upon, etcetera. Now,
(30:40):
on the day of the eruption, it's estimated that of
the between ten thousand and twenty thousand inhabitants of Pompeii,
about two thousand inhabitants were probably killed, and when you
add up all those who perished in other Vesuvian settlements
like the towns of Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabbia, Stabia was
where plenty of the elder sale to help his friend,
(31:02):
somewhere close to maybe like sixteen thousand people died in total,
though it's very difficult to have accurate numbers. But one
thing that makes Pompey special is because of the way
it was buried under the ash and ejecta of the eruption,
Pompeii became at once both obscure and illuminating. Obscure of course,
because it was literally hidden from investigation. It's sort of
(31:25):
vanished from history, as if wiped off the face of
the earth because it had been paved over by the volcano.
But at the same time, uh it kind of became
a bright and transparent window into life in ancient Roman
times because under all of that dust, the city was
almost perfectly preserved. Since it had been buried and erased
(31:45):
from history, there's no way for the remains of the
city to be disturbed. And it was also very democratic
in its preservation of the dead. Uh So it's one
of these great examples where we we get a little
inside into just how daily life worked in this city
before the eruption. Yeah, many people are just found, presumably
(32:06):
lying dead, exactly where they were when the calamity hit,
and so the city basically stayed that way until amateur
excavation of the of this geologically paved oversight began around
an event that is sometimes referred to as the birth
of modern archaeology. All right, on that note, we're going
to take one more break, but when we come back,
(32:27):
we're going to continue our exploration by looking at the
volcanic eruption itself. Than alright, we're back. Okay, so we've
gotten the ground level view of what was happening on
the day of the eruption of Vesuvius in but what
do we know now looking back with the scientific lens.
(32:48):
What what do we think probably happened on that day
in geological terms? All right, well, let's let's back up
a little bit and just talk about the basic idea
of volcano. Of volcano, of course, is just a upture
in a planet's crust, but there are are various types
of volcanoes, depending on their location, their history, and the
the underlying activity. Fun fact, though the word volcano derives
(33:12):
from the volcanic isle of Volcano, named for Vulcan, the
Roman god of fire. The Greeks knew this island by
other names, but they also considered it the foundry of Hephaestus,
basically the equivalent of Vulcan. Yeah, they're like the forge,
god of sparks and banging. Yeah. So so again, you know,
the ancient people's definitely knew of volcanoes, and they were
(33:33):
remembered at least in the in the construction of myths
and the naming of places. Now, Vesuvius itself is considered
a soma stratovolcano. Um. It's also considered a complex volcano.
So let's talk about what this means. First, we'll talk
about the soma part. So, if you were to travel
(33:54):
back four hundred thousand years or so, you would not
find Mount Vesuvia, said all. Rather, you'd find Mount Soma.
So Mount Soma underwent various eruptions, and we have to
remember that volcanoes are places of violent change, and due
to these violent eruptions, Mount Soma eventually collapse into what
(34:16):
is known as a caldera. So this occurs when a
particularly violent eruption empties the underlying magma chamber of a volcano,
making it impossible for it to support its own weight. Alright,
so um again, it's like the volcano just has erupted
so much, and it grew so much, erupted so much
that it's just caved in on itself. It's just destroyed itself.
(34:39):
It's like if you you were too empty out all
of the molten lava from your molten lava cake and
then the cake just collapses. Right. All you have with
like the edges of the cake that form like like
ring mountain around a center. It's like a crater um.
And this is where we get that classic image of
what a volcano you usually looks like. If you draw
a cartoon volcano, you're probably drawing a ring shaped called
(35:00):
where the top of the mountain has collapsed after some
eruption in the past. But even though the the the
the mountain itself has collapsed, the underlying volcanic avict activity
is still there. So magma and volcanic gases continue to build,
and this can result in a few different varieties of caldera.
The center can swell back up into what is known
(35:20):
as a resurgent dome like with the yellow Stone, and
it's you know, it's so called supervolcano. But in the
case of Vesuvius, another volcanic cone and this is the
Mount of Vesuvius, rises up in the center of the
Soma Caldera. And this is why we call this type
of volcano a Soma volcano. So the remnants again of
(35:42):
the old mountain, the caldera, are still around it, and
the Soma Caldera is also sometimes referred to it's just
Mount Soma today. But again it is the remnant of
the old mountain and in the center is Vesuvius. That's
hard I mean volcano inside a volcano, right, and again
it's important to know, yeah, Vesuvia is certainly in geologic time,
is is a young volcano. Okay, So what sort of
(36:03):
volcano is Vesuvius itself. We'll remember we used the the
description a Soma strato volcano. So a strato volcano is
a steep conical volcano built from many layers of lava
ash pomis and tefra tefra that's a pyroclass or rejected
fragments from the volcano that have fallen to the ground.
All of this from various eruptions, building up, building up
(36:26):
this volcano. Now you mentioned it was a young volcano. Yes,
relatively young again in terms of geologic time. Uh, certainly
human time is a different matter, which we'll get into. Uh.
During its life, it's had periods of activity and inactivity.
Its most recent period of activity as of this recording
was between nineteen thirteen and nineteen forty four CE. And
(36:51):
today it's uh, you know it's it's it's inactive. You
rather inactive. You can actually hike up to the top. Uh.
It's eruptions, however, we're known in ancient times. But at
the time of its eruption in seventy nine C, it
had been inactive for at least two hundred and ninety
five years. It was reputed to have erupted into seventeen
(37:11):
b c E based on the writings of Solicitaicus, but
a great many modern writers have rejected this. We know
it sustained a particularly powerful eruption during the second millennium
b c E. This is the Avellino eruption, which decimated
the Bronze Age settlements in the area. Uh. But again
(37:32):
we it's ultimately a situation where we don't have a
lot of information about its pre about its activity in
pre seventy nine c e UH in that time period,
but we can presume that it had been centuries since
its last eruption. Avelino is the name of another town
nearby Naples, so it's actually I remember that because it's
the town that Tony Soprano's family comes from. Okay. At
(37:54):
any rate, enough time had passed for humans in this
region to lose their immediate fear the mountain um, and
so cities encroached upon its domain, gardens and vineyards popped
up around it. The children of Prometheus grew bold in
the silence of Vesuvius. But again it's it's clear that
they had not really completely forgotten what Vesuvius had been
(38:17):
capable of in the past. Myths of giants battling Hercules, uh,
you know, still remained about the mountain. Uh. There were
geologic connections that linked that clearly linked Vesuvius to Mount Etna,
which was certainly active and was described erupting again in
Virgils and need, which I referred to earlier. So it's
not like people did not know what had happened here
(38:41):
in the past, or what a volcano looked like, I mean,
there was it was the world wasn't completely ignorant of
what it could do. You know, it's kind of weird.
It's it's one of these tragedies of time scales that
humans are I feel like, almost constantly facing off against,
where if you look at the activity of a volcano
across geologic time, you just see it's pretty regular, you know,
(39:05):
pretty frequently this thing is going to erupt. But then
you zoom into human historical time and the eruptions are
not quite frequent enough to discourage settlement because our memories
are not that long, like a few hundred years. Seems like,
you know, an eternity to an individual person. Yeah, yeah,
I mean the whole whole lives will pass during the
(39:26):
periods of relative inactivity of a volcano, uh in many
of these cases. So you know, we don't know everything
about the seventy nine CE eruption a k a. The
plan a plan a in eruption named for plenty, but
but we still know quite a bit, as it was
again the first volcanic eruption to be described in detail.
(39:46):
We have plenty of the Younger's excellent descriptions of the
pre eruption, quakes, the eruption itself, the ash fall, pyroclastic flows,
and the resulting mild tsunami in the Bay of Naples.
It is estimated that the column of ash that rose
up into the sky towered some twenty miles or thirty
two kilometers, and then it ejected one cubic mile or
(40:07):
four cubic kilometers of ash in just something like nineteen hours.
Ten ft of tephra fell on Pompeii, pyroclastic flow buried
herculaneum under seventy five ft or twenty three ms of ash,
and will eventually look at what all of this meant
for the humans who resided in the impacted cities as well,
like on a biological level. I think we'll have to
(40:28):
get into that in the next episode. Yeah, it's also
been estimated that the eruption itself would have carried the
thermal energy of a hundred thousand Hiroshima atomic bombs, and
all of this would have lasted roughly two days. Vesuvius
has erupted some three dozen times since uh, sometimes with
deadly results. Mud flows and lava flows from a sixt
(40:51):
thirty one eruption killed, but some three thousand, five hundred people,
and today, as before the seventy nine CE eruption, vineyards
and orchards cover the slopes of the mountain. Uh, there's
an there's an enormous population surrounding the volcano today. I
believe the area is like the most densely populated part
(41:12):
of Italy. Right. I've also seen it described as the
as the most densely populated area surrounding a volcano on Earth.
But again, the yeah, people, but it's beautiful. You look
at these pictures, it's beautiful. There's an actually tremendous amount
of growth there. Again, the soil is very fertile um
and before the eruption of six thirty one, during a
very long period of inactivity, forests are actually said to
(41:34):
have grown in the crater, and you would have found
three lakes there as well. So yeah, given the the
amount of time, the great amount of time relative to
the human experience and even the lives of plants that
transpires between eruptions, I mean, you can have a great
greening of the mountain occur. Oh man, I wish I
could see what that was like to have the forests
(41:56):
and the lakes down in there, because I love that
kind of thing. I don't know if you've been the
Crater Lake in Oregon. I have not, Well, you've probably
seen images of it. At least it's absolutely gorgeous, one
of the most amazing beautiful places I've ever been. But
I think it's exactly that contrast of like of uh,
this clear still water and all these forests in life
just flooding in to this place where there was catastrophic destruction,
(42:21):
you know, some number of centuries ago, right, and then
that and then the humans come in as well, And
there's probably something elegant to be said about just like
the nature of of the human experience too, you know,
like even though something terrible happened here, humans have a
way in many cases of moving forward through it and
and finding a way to make a life there. I
know it's not this way, but it almost it seems
(42:43):
almost malicious, like the the the volcano with this fertile
volcanic soil is just sort of like baiting you. It
is like leaving out this bait to attract you into
the geologic trap. Sorry, I know that's anthropomorphizing. It's it's
not the volcane know, it's fault. It doesn't mean to
hurt you. Yeah, I think even Tolkien didn't say Mount
(43:05):
Doom itself was evil, right, it was just but Mount
Doom is more what you'd expect. It's in more door,
which is a place where even the air, the very
air you breathe as a toxic fume and nothing grows there.
And you know, it's just like it's just this blasted landscape.
I mean no, that this is the case where the
area right around this volcano that could erupt again is
extremely beautiful and fertile and inviting to life. All right,
(43:29):
On that note, we're gonna go ahead and call it
for this episode, but we will be back in the
next episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind to continue
our discussions regarding Vesuvious. We're gonna get into some of
the sort of forensic evidence of what happened to the
people in Pompeii. We're gonna get into We're gonna discuss
the possible remains of Plenty the Elder, and will also
(43:51):
just discuss the continued threat posed by volcanoes to settled
regions today and you know, and some some about you know,
what we what we're prepared to do or unprepared to
do about their eruptions. I can't wait. I've been wanting
to talk about this for so long. I'm so glad
we finally got here. Yeah, and I think it may
kick off even further UM further episodes that deal with
(44:13):
volcanoes and UH and human history. There's a there's a
lot of rich there's a lot of rich soil UH
that that is left behind by these UH. These often
cata cataclysmic events. In the meantime, if you want to
check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
you can find our show wherever you get your podcasts UM.
(44:33):
If you go to Stuff to Build your Mind dot com,
that will definitely redirect you to the I Heart page
for our show, where you can subscribe, you can download, etcetera,
and wherever you get the show. We encourage you to
do those things. Rate, review, subscribe. These are the things
you can do to help the show, as well as
just telling a a friend in the real world UH.
(44:55):
Just spread the word huge thanks as always to our
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to get in touch with us with feedback on this
episode or any other to suggest topic for the future
or just to say hi. You can email us at
contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
(45:19):
to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radios.
How stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio
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you listen to your favorite shows radi
Soon afterwards, the cloud began to descend and cover the sea.
It had already surrounded and concealed the island of Capri
and the promontory of mycene Him. My mother begged me
to leave her and escape as best I could, but
I absolutely refused, taking her by the hand and making
her to hurry along with me. Ash was already falling
(00:24):
by now, though in no great quantity. Then I turned
and saw a thick black cloud advancing over the land
behind us like a flood. Let us leave the road
while we can still see, I said, But we will
be knocked down and trampled by the crowd. We had
scarcely sat down when darkness came upon us. Not such
as we have when the sky is cloudy or when
(00:45):
there is no moon, but that of a room when
it is shut up and all the lamps put out
(01:10):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. A production of
I Heart Radios has to work. Hey, welcome to stuff
to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamp and
I'm Joe McCormick. And if you know your ancient Roman literature,
you might have guessed from that opening that today we're
gonna be talking about the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Uh.
(01:33):
This is something that I've wanted to do an episode
on for a long time, mainly because I love some
of the ancient Roman original documents that we're going to
be reading from today that they are like so crisp
as a descriptive source of this ancient catastrophe that happened
in the year seventy nine. Yeah, this is a This
is a topic I'm excited to get into as well
(01:55):
because I definitely have strong childhood memories of of course
being fascinated with volcanoes. Volcanoes along with dinosaurs are just
part of being a child. But then also I remember
having a national copy of National Geographic that had all
these beautiful, haunting photographs of the remnants of Pompeii, Uh,
(02:15):
the the victims of Vesuvius. Yeah, it's funny you should
bring up dinosaurs, because I think this was sort of
in the back of my mind and I hadn't brought
it to the front until you said that there's a
weird way that in a lot of the paleo art
that I grew up with as a child. I think
we've actually mentioned this on the show before, that dinosaurs
are often depicted with volcanoes currently erupting in the background.
(02:38):
Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, absolutely, you
see it all the time. And the thing is, sometimes
I feel like the artists, the paleo artist in question,
is definitely trying to get something across, like this is
a region in which they were volcanic eruptions, or perhaps
they're discussing the role of volcanoes, the role they may
have possibly played according to various theories regarding extinction events.
(03:01):
But other times I think it's this just idea of
this was this primal dangerous age in which the earth
is opening up, monsters are walking about, feasting on each other.
It's just that the world is alive with danger. I
think that's correct. But I think there's also something to
the thing you mentioned first, like the idea that volcanoes
(03:22):
are sometimes invoked as one of the explanatory mechanisms for
some of the extinction events that killed lots of the dinosaurs,
And because they're thought of this way, we think about
dinosaurs often, like as if we we mainly think of
them in like the last moments before they were wiped
from the face of the earth. That's like the defining
time of their existence. They're frozen and amber, uh in
(03:46):
the moment right before their doom. And in a strange way,
that is quite literally the case about the settlements surrounding
Mount Vesuvius. Absolutely. I mean, that's one of the things
about Pompei is it is it allows us to to
look into the path in ways that the remains of
other ancient cities do not. Yeah, it's for that reason
that at the same time that it's very grim to
(04:08):
look at, it's also kind of magical. Uh. So we're
gonna be talking about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. This
this catastrophe in the year seventy nine CE that obliterated
several Roman settlements around the Bay of Naples, including the
city of Pompeii and the town of Herculaneum. And historians
studying the subject are very lucky because we actually have
(04:29):
access to historical documents describing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius
in seventy nine in extreme detail. Specifically, this is a
pair of letters written by the first century Roman politician
and author Plenty the Younger, who is in fact the
nephew of the great Roman author and encyclopedist Plenty the elder,
(04:50):
whose natural history we reference on the show all the
time for insights on what the ancient Romans thought they
knew about everything from sea monsters to the culinary virtues
of lead. That's right, I feel it. Scarcely a month
goes by that we don't reference plenty of the Elder.
So it's it's it's great and of course bitter sweet
to meet up with him again here, right, because this,
(05:11):
of course is the end of the story of plenty
of the Elder. He spent a lifetime collecting all of
this knowledge and pseudo knowledge about the world. But we've
never discussed before how plenty of the Elder died. It
was the mountain that killed him. So about these letters
describing the event. Sometime early in the second century CE,
I think I've seen it placed, maybe around the year
one oh four, one oh five, something like that. Around
(05:34):
this time, plenty Of the Younger wrote two letters to
the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus to give his firsthand account
of the eruption and to explain the ultimate fate of
his uncle. Now, these two letters are famous for their
vivid description of the events, and so we wanted to
put you on the ground during the eruption of Vesuvius.
(05:54):
By reading some selections from these letters. Uh, these will
come from a couple of different England translations that you
can easily find online. I sort of made a composite
out of two different translations, trying to take some of
the best parts from each one. One is from a
book called Volcanoes of Europe from Dunedin Academic Press from
seventeen by Degal Jeram Alwyn Scarth and Jean Claude Tangai.
(06:19):
And then there's another widely used English translation by William Melmouth.
So those two came together to to create what you're
about to hear. Yes, these are are typically described as
the the oldest detailed accounts, detailed firsthand accounts of a
volcanic eruption. That's not to say that volcanic eruptions were
(06:39):
not known to to do ancient people's They were known,
um and then we have mentioned of them popping out.
There's even I read there's there's an argument that Virgils
mention of an eruption of Mount Etna in the in
Needed was actually generated via firsthand observation, But even that
(07:00):
would not be the level of detail that we're discussing here, right,
I have not found any evidence of a description of
a volcanic eruption in in literary history older than Plenty's
description here that contains nearly anywhere close to the amount
of detail we get right, certainly nothing that has survived,
and probably because a lot of the people who might
(07:21):
have been in a position to write such an account
themselves did not survive. Uh So, Plenty the Younger begins
his first letter by praising Tacitus's skills as a writer
of history and talking about his uncle, Plenty of the Elder,
and he he says, basically, you know, my uncle died
in a misfortune, but there's a chance to redeem his legacy,
(07:41):
because if you put him in your in your history,
if his name becomes associated with the eruption of Vesuvius,
it will render his name immortal. Uh So, I'm going
to pick up after that section of of introduction and
just read from Plenty's account within his first letter. At
the time of the great eruption, my uncle Plenty was
with the fleet under his command at mycene him on
(08:04):
the August about one in the afternoon. My mother desired
him to observe a cloud which appeared of a very
unusual size and shape. He had just taken a turn
in the sun, and after bathing himself in cold water
and making a light luncheon, he had gone back to
his books. He immediately arose and went out upon a promontory,
(08:25):
from whence he might get a better site of this
very uncommon appearance. From that distance, it was not clear
from which mountain the cloud was rising, although it was
found afterwards to be vesuvious. The cloud could best be
described as more like an umbrella pine than any other tree,
for it rose high up like a trunk, and then
divided into branches. I imagined that this was because it
(08:48):
was thrust up by the initial blast until its power weakened,
and it was left unsupported and spread out sideways under
its own weight. Sometimes it looked light colored, sometimes it
looked modeled and dirty, with the earth and cinders it
had carried up. This phenomenon seemed to a man of
such learning and research as my uncle, extraordinary and worth
(09:09):
further looking into. He ordered a light vessel to be
got ready and gave me leave if I liked it
to accompany him. I said, I had rather go on
with my work, and it so happened. He had himself
given me something to ride out. As he was coming
out of the house, he received a note from Retina,
the wife of Tascus, who was in the utmost alarm
(09:31):
at the immediate danger which threatened her for her villa.
Lying at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. There was no
way of escape but by boat. She was terrified by
the threatening danger and begged him to rescue her. He's
changed his plan at once, and what he had started
in a spirit of scientific curiosity, he ended as a hero.
(09:51):
You know. At this point I always stopped and I wonder, like,
how did he get the note? I imagine it must
have come to him across the water, right that maybe
in a smaller boat she was able to send a
noe doubt and to ask him to come back with
larger boats that she and her family could escape on.
I imagine, I mean, the only ways it would be
that or by some manner of bird. Yeah, as long
as we're interjecting, I want to remind everyone here that
(10:14):
that Plenty of the Elder would have been about fifty
six years old at this point. If you're trying to
picture him in your head, and perhaps cast Um an
actor in the role. Yes, and the younger Plenty also
says of his uncle that he was that he was
like brave and stout, But he he also says, he
was a quite corpulent man, so like he wasn't necessarily,
you know, fit as a fiddle to be running out
(10:36):
into danger. But anyway, to go back to the account,
uh Plenty continues, he ordered the galleys to be put
to sea, and he went himself on board with an
intention of assisting not only Rectina, but the several other
towns which lay thickly strewn along that beautiful coast, hastening
then to the place from whence others fled with the
utmost terror. He steered his course direct to the point
(10:58):
of danger, and so much calmness and presence of mind
as to be able to make and dictate his observations
upon the motion and all the phenomena of that dreadful scene.
So he's taken notes as he goes. He was now
so close to the mountain that the cinders, which grew
thicker and hotter the nearer he approached, fell into the ships,
together with pumice stones and black pieces of burning rocks
(11:22):
shattered by the fire. They were in danger too, not
only of being a ground by the sudden retreat of
the sea, but also from the vast fragments which rolled
down from the mountain and obstructed all the shore. Can
you imagine that being out on a boat and so
like the sea is first of all pulling away from
the shore as you're trying to get into the shore
(11:43):
to rescue people from the villas along the shoreline, So
the seas retreating, and then also stuff from the mountain
is now coming down and making its way into the water, right,
I mean, it must have been like approaching a shore
upon which there was a battle. Only instead of two
human force is engaged in battle, it is a battle
between civilization and the elements of the earth itself. Unreal.
(12:06):
He continues. Here he stopped to consider whether he should
turn back, for the pilot was advising retreat. Fortune favors
the brave, he said, Steer to where Pomponius is from.
Ponianus lived at Testavia, a town across the Bay of Naples,
which was not yet in danger, but would be threatened
if the eruption spread. Pomponianus had already put his belongings
(12:31):
into a boat to escape as soon as the contrary
onshore wind changed, The wind, of course, was fully in
my uncle's favor, and quickly brought his boat to Stabia.
My uncle calmed and encouraged his terrified friend the more
effectually to soothe his fears by seeming unconcerned himself. He
ordered the drawing of a hot bath, and then, after
(12:51):
having bathed, sat down to supper with great cheerfulness, or
at least with every appearance of it, which is just
as brave. Is that? Just as I guess? So, Yeah,
if you're like trying to calm other people even though
you are yourself scared, Yeah, I mean, if there's only
so much you can do, calmness is going to help
and help to maintain a a proper retreat. I mean,
(13:14):
I guess to a certain extent one could again apply
to military metaphor here, you know, and the military backgrounds
of individuals involved. Yeah, So I guess what they're saying
here is that he's stuck at the house until the
winds change and they can get out by water, and
trying to encourage people not to panic while they're while
they're there, so plenty continues. Meanwhile, tall broad flames blazed
(13:36):
from several places on Vesuvious and glared out through the
darkness of the night. But my uncle, in order to
soothe the apprehensions of his friend, assured him it was
only the burning of the villages which the country people
had abandoned to the flames. After this he retired to rest,
and it is most certain that he was so little
disquieted as to fall into a sound sleep, for his breathing,
(13:58):
which on account of his corpulence, was rather heavy and sonorous,
was heard by the attendants outside his door. But eventually
the courtyard outside began to fill with so much ash
and pummice that if he had stayed in his room,
he would never have been able to get out. So
he was awakened, and he went to Pompony Inis and
the rest of the company, who had stayed up all
(14:19):
night and were feeling too anxious to think of going
to bed. They consulted together whether it would be most
prudent to trust to the houses, which now rocked from
side to side with frequent and violent concussions, as though
shaken from their very foundations, or fly to the open fields,
where the stones and cinders, though light and porous, fell
(14:39):
in large showers and threatened destruction. In this choice of dangers,
they resolved for the fields, a resolution which, while the
rest of the company were hurried into by their fears,
my uncle embraced upon cool and deliberate consideration. They went
out then having pillows tied upon their heads with napkins,
for this was their whole defense against the storm of
(15:01):
stones that fell around them. And I have to admit
that is that is a slightly comical mental image. Yes,
it is put in your head. Well it's it's like
both at the same time. It's like funny, but it's
also so grim and so real, Like you can imagine like, Okay,
so the house you're you're afraid the house is going
to collapse. You've got to get away from the house.
But outside the house, stuff is, rocks are falling from
(15:22):
the sky. So what do you do? You know, like
it's not safe to be under a roof. So like
they literally were like, okay, we've got to improvise helmets, right, yeah,
So yeah, I agree, it is it is both a
little bit comic but also terrifying. I mean, this whole
situation is terrifying. And I think one thing to keep
in mind too, is we read this account is again
thinking about to what extent Plenty is trying to manage
(15:45):
evacuation and to to to manage their response, a calm
response to this catastrophe that's taking place, because that is
going to be vital not only did this scenario, but
to other scenarios and even future scenarios regarding the clash
of human civilization and volcanic activity. Yes. Uh, And you
say he's having to manage in evacuation, he's not only
(16:07):
having to do that, he's having to improvise management of
an evacuation because they don't know what the best practices are.
So anyway goes on to the conclusion of the letter here.
So they've gone out with the pillows tied to their heads,
and then Plenty of the younger says it was now
daylight everywhere else, but they're a deeper darkness prevailed than
in the thickest night, and they were forced to light
(16:27):
their torches and lamps. My uncle went down to the
shore to see if there was any chance of escape
by sea, but the waves were still far too high.
There my uncle, laying himself down upon a sail cloth
which was spread for him, called twice for some cold water,
which he drank. Then immediately the flames, preceded by a
strong whift of sulfur, dispersed the rest of the party
(16:50):
and obliged him to rise. He raised himself up with
the assistance of his two servants, and instantly fell down dead, suffocated,
as I conjecture, by gross and noxious vapor, having always
had a weak throat which was often inflamed as soon
as it was light again, which was not till the
third day after this melancholy accident. His body was found
(17:11):
entire and without any marks of violence upon it, in
the dress in which he fell, and looking more like
a man asleep than dead. So plenty of the elder
dies here on the shore, but not everybody in his
party does, because, of course, like the servants and friends,
are later able to report back to plenty of the
younger what happened to his uncle right, and and of
course plenty of the younger mentions his his ailing lungs
(17:35):
as being a possible reason that he succumbed to these fumes.
It has also been hypothesized that he could have actually
even though by all appearances it might have had something
to do with the fumes it also could have simply
been a stroke or heart attack. Yeah, I mean, obviously
this is a high stress, high exertion situation, um, and
(17:55):
he wasn't a young man anymore. But so Plenty then
ends his letter by saying he witnessed a lot of
other stuff, but he didn't include it in the letter
because Tacitus originally had only asked how his uncle had died.
And apparently Tacitus wrote back and wanted to know more.
He wanted to know details about what the younger Plenty
and his mother had encountered when they stayed behind it
(18:16):
Mycene him. And that makes for the content of the
second letter. So maybe we should take a break, and
then when we come back we can read from plenty
second letter about the eruption. Than alright, we're back. So
before the break we were discussing how Plenty the elder died,
and now we are essentially going to explore how Plenty
(18:37):
of the younger lived. Yes, so now remember in the
first letter, Plenty of the younger and his mother stayed
behind at Mycene him while the elder took the fleet
out to help people who were further along the shore.
And so plenty picks up his narrative like this. He says,
after my uncle left us, I studied, dined, and went
to bed, but slept only fitfully. We had had earth
(18:58):
tremors for several days, which were not especially alarming because
they happened so often in Campania. But that night they
were so violent that everything felt as if it were
being shaken and turned over. My mother came hurrying to
my room, and we sat together in the forecourt facing
the sea. As I was at that time but eighteen
years of age. I know not whether I should call
(19:19):
my behavior in this dangerous juncture courage or folly. But
I looked up to Livy and amused myself with turning
over that author and even making extracts from him, as
if I had been perfectly at my leisure. Though it
was now morning, the light was still exceedingly faint and doubtful,
The buildings around were already tottering, and we would have
(19:41):
been in danger in our confined space if our house
had fallen down. This made us decide to leave town.
We were chased after by a panic stricken crowd that
chose to follow someone else's judgment rather than decide anything
for themselves. I love that detail that he's like he's
trying to act like he's not afraid, so he's just
going on with his studies. Is like, I'll just keep
(20:01):
reading Livy and make some notes. And then again this
is terrifying scene of like every no one knows what
to do, and so like, of course they're going to
follow uh cliny here, just like like somebody who looks
like they know what needs to be done, it knows
no where they need to go. They're going to fall
in behind them. We Also, he was the of a
(20:22):
family of military command, so his uncle would have been
known as the commander of the fleet there at the bay.
So I think if the relatives of the commanders suddenly
start leaving town, everybody is going to see that and
be like, we probably need to get out to Yeah,
I would. I would say, you know, the comeback here
would be of course we're following you and not thinking
for ourselves. You're the military, like you're you're a are
(20:45):
you're the one to follow you. We're not going to
trust your own judgment here you are the Navy. But again,
this would not have been a time when people had
like a list of safety procedures they could look up
for a volcanic eruption. I mean you, you have no precedent,
You have no idea what to do, right, because as
will as we'll discuss as we get into this topic more.
This volcano had not erupted in quite a while. It
(21:07):
had at the very least been centuries. Yeah. Now Plenty
picks up of this narrative. He says, being at a
convenient distance from the houses, we stood still in the
midst of a most dangerous and dreadful scene. The carriages
we had ordered began to lurch to and fro, although
the ground was flat, and we could not keep them still,
even when we wedged their wheels with stones. Then we
(21:29):
saw the sea sucked back, apparently by a convulsion of
the earth, and many sea creatures were left stranded on
the dry sand. From the other direction, over the land,
a dreadful black cloud was torn by gushing flames and
great tongues of fire, like much magnified lightning. Soon afterwards,
the cloud began to descend and cover the sea it
(21:52):
had already surrounded and concealed the island of Capri and
the promontory of my Sine Him, my mother begged me
to leave her and escape as best I could, but
I absolutely refused, taking her by the hand and making
her to hurry along with me. Ash was already falling
by now, though in no great quantity. Then I turned
and saw a thick black cloud advancing over the land
(22:14):
behind us like a flood. Let us leave the road
while we still can see, I said, or we will
be knocked down and trampled by the crowd. We had
scarcely sat down when darkness came upon us, Not such
as we have when the sky is cloudy or when
there is no moon, but that of a room when
it is shut up and all the lamps put out.
Can you imagine that? So this is daytime now, but
(22:36):
the it is not only dark like a night, it
is darker than night. Yeah, this is this is the
darkness at noon type situation exactly. So he goes on
to describe the terror of the scene. He says, you
might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children,
and the shouts of men, some calling for their children,
others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking
(22:57):
to recognize each other by the voices that were led.
One lamenting his own fate, another that of his family,
Some praying to die from the very fear of dying,
some lifting their hands to the gods. But the greater
part convinced that there were now no gods at all,
and that the final, endless night of which we had
heard had come upon the world. Among these there were
(23:20):
some who augmented the real terrors by others imaginary or
willfully invented. I remember some who declared that one part
of my snum had fallen, that another was on fire.
It was false, but they found people to believe them.
So just chaos is reigning, misinformation is flying. The world
is dark and full of terror. The day is dark
(23:42):
and full of terrors. All right, he continues, It now
grew rather lighter, which we imagined to be the forerunner
of an approaching burst of flames, as in truth it
was rather than the return of day. However, the fire
fell at a distance from us. Then again we were
inst in a thick darkness, and a heavy shower of
(24:02):
ashes rained upon us, which we were obliged every now
and then to stand up to shake off. Otherwise we
should have been crushed and buried in the heap. I
matt it might have boasted that during all this scene
of horror, not a sigh or expression of fear escaped me.
But in truth my support was grounded in that miserable
though mighty consolation that all mankind were involved in the
(24:25):
same calamity, and that I was perishing with the world itself.
That line has haunted me ever since I first read it.
That he says he's not afraid because he knew it
wasn't just him dying, it was the end of the
entire world. And finally he concludes the letters, saying, at
last the darkness paled into smoke or cloud, and the
(24:47):
real daylight returned, But the sun shone with a lurid light,
as during an eclipse. Every object that presented itself to
our weakened eyes seemed to change, being covered deep with
ashes as with snow. We returned to mycene Him, where
we refreshed ourselves as well as we could, and passed
an anxious night between hope and fear, though indeed with
(25:10):
a much larger share of the latter, for the earthquake
still continued, while many frenzied persons ran up and down,
heightening their own and their friends calamities. By terrible predictions. So,
first of all, I think those letters are just amazing
literary documents. But also I wanted to say, there is
a painting that I've seen online several times that captures
(25:33):
the spirit of those letters pretty well for me. It's
called The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by the English
romantic painter John Martin. Yeah. All right, so we've presented
you with the drama of what is happening. Let's provide
a little background just about this region, about Pompeii and
some of these other cities that we were name dropping, right,
(25:55):
what was going on in the area before the seventy
nine eruption of Vesuvius. So the part of Italy immediately
surrounding Mount Vesuvius. The the larger region here is known
as Campania, which Plenty makes reference to because he says,
you know, we were used to earthquakes in Campania. It's
kind of a geologically active region. So when the little
(26:15):
earthquakes began, we weren't too worried at first, and still,
you know, until it started rocking the house back and forth. Um,
and so Campania translates into I think roughly into the
word countryside. Apparently it was once known as the Campania
Felix or the Happy countryside. And it's this region in
the southwestern part of the Italian peninsula along the Tyrannian Sea,
(26:39):
and its capital is, of course, the coastal city of
Naples or Napoly in Italian. This is where the pizza
comes from, is it? I think maybe it is a
famous variety of pizza that comes from Here's Nepolitan and Neapolitan.
I'm not sure. I don't know what the relationship between
those two works. You thinking about ice cream? Maybe, I
don't know. We'll have to get this. We'll have to
come back to it on our other show Invention. Just
(27:02):
right in and shame us. Go ahead, Okay. So today,
Campania is a highly sought after tourist destination, in large
part due to the natural beauty of its coastline, including
stretches like the famous Amalfi Coast. If you've seen these
gorgeous photos of like little antique towns nestled into the
(27:22):
steeply descending hillsides between looming cliffs, sull covered in trees
and lush greenery. This kind of stuff along the waterfront
in Italy, I think there's a very good chance that
you are looking at images of the Amalfi coast. But
it turns out that the tourism industry is not new
in Campania. Even in the first century during the Roman Empire,
(27:43):
places especially around the Bay of Naples, were extremely fashionable
as vacation resorts for the rich elite of Rome and
other capitals of the Empire. And again you just look
up pictures of this place and you instantly understand why
it is a place of of of absolutely gorgeous natural
formations and vegetation. The coastline is pristine and striking. I mean,
(28:04):
I want to go there right now. Yes, yes, looking
at a photos of this region, which which is still
a vacation destination. Like you said, it looks very inviting.
But that's not all. Of course, Campania also has a
reputation as a rich and fertile farmland, both then and now,
and it's even today. It's very densely populated. But it's
(28:25):
also a center of agricultural food production for Italy. Yes,
lots of orchards, lots of vineyards. Uh. Now, probably the
most famous point of destruction within this this sort of
broad cone of destruction from the vesuvious eruption is the
city of Pompeii. It was a city that had been
settled by seafaring Greeks almost a thousand years before, like
(28:48):
in the eighth century b C. And then for several
centuries after that was a city controlled variously by the
Greeks and the Etruscans, sometimes trading off. It only fell
under Roman control during the second century b C. E
Before the Empire. This would have been during the period
of the Roman Republic. UH. And then by seventy nine c.
Pompeii had somewhere between like ten thousand and twenty thousand inhabitants.
(29:13):
It was wealthy, it was thriving. Like other places in Campania,
Pompeii was a resort for the famous and the powerful
families of Rome, with expensive villas, bath houses, restaurants, brothels,
you know, kind of a kind of an aspen of
ancient Rome, all right. Uh. The one problem, of course,
that is that all of this was built up in
(29:33):
the region surrounding Vesuvius and uh and of course Vesuvius
at the time was slumbering, or seemed to be slumbering,
But then in seventy nine it awakens and you know
I would say it's not. We can come back to
this later if you want, but it's not necessarily just
a coincidence that like, this is a place of great
beauty and agricultural production, so it draws a lot of
(29:56):
people and just happens to be near a dangerous active volcano.
There might be some reasons that both of these things
are true. Oh yeah, I mean yeah, we can go
and touch on these facts really quickly, because first of all,
we mentioned how fertile, uh, the the area is, how
well things grow even on the slopes of Vesuvius itself,
(30:16):
and that is because of this rich volcanic soil. Yes,
and I think it's also possible to argue that some
of the geologic features that make it kind of risky
in terms of volcanic activity also contribute to the beauty
of its coastline. Absolutely. I mean the the the volcanic
activity is the the the engine that formed the land
that people are occupying, that people are growing crops upon, etcetera. Now,
(30:40):
on the day of the eruption, it's estimated that of
the between ten thousand and twenty thousand inhabitants of Pompeii,
about two thousand inhabitants were probably killed, and when you
add up all those who perished in other Vesuvian settlements
like the towns of Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabbia, Stabia was
where plenty of the elder sale to help his friend,
(31:02):
somewhere close to maybe like sixteen thousand people died in total,
though it's very difficult to have accurate numbers. But one
thing that makes Pompey special is because of the way
it was buried under the ash and ejecta of the eruption,
Pompeii became at once both obscure and illuminating. Obscure of course,
because it was literally hidden from investigation. It's sort of
(31:25):
vanished from history, as if wiped off the face of
the earth because it had been paved over by the volcano.
But at the same time, uh it kind of became
a bright and transparent window into life in ancient Roman
times because under all of that dust, the city was
almost perfectly preserved. Since it had been buried and erased
(31:45):
from history, there's no way for the remains of the
city to be disturbed. And it was also very democratic
in its preservation of the dead. Uh So it's one
of these great examples where we we get a little
inside into just how daily life worked in this city
before the eruption. Yeah, many people are just found, presumably
(32:06):
lying dead, exactly where they were when the calamity hit,
and so the city basically stayed that way until amateur
excavation of the of this geologically paved oversight began around
an event that is sometimes referred to as the birth
of modern archaeology. All right, on that note, we're going
to take one more break, but when we come back,
(32:27):
we're going to continue our exploration by looking at the
volcanic eruption itself. Than alright, we're back. Okay, so we've
gotten the ground level view of what was happening on
the day of the eruption of Vesuvius in but what
do we know now looking back with the scientific lens.
(32:48):
What what do we think probably happened on that day
in geological terms? All right, well, let's let's back up
a little bit and just talk about the basic idea
of volcano. Of volcano, of course, is just a upture
in a planet's crust, but there are are various types
of volcanoes, depending on their location, their history, and the
the underlying activity. Fun fact, though the word volcano derives
(33:12):
from the volcanic isle of Volcano, named for Vulcan, the
Roman god of fire. The Greeks knew this island by
other names, but they also considered it the foundry of Hephaestus,
basically the equivalent of Vulcan. Yeah, they're like the forge,
god of sparks and banging. Yeah. So so again, you know,
the ancient people's definitely knew of volcanoes, and they were
(33:33):
remembered at least in the in the construction of myths
and the naming of places. Now, Vesuvius itself is considered
a soma stratovolcano. Um. It's also considered a complex volcano.
So let's talk about what this means. First, we'll talk
about the soma part. So, if you were to travel
(33:54):
back four hundred thousand years or so, you would not
find Mount Vesuvia, said all. Rather, you'd find Mount Soma.
So Mount Soma underwent various eruptions, and we have to
remember that volcanoes are places of violent change, and due
to these violent eruptions, Mount Soma eventually collapse into what
(34:16):
is known as a caldera. So this occurs when a
particularly violent eruption empties the underlying magma chamber of a volcano,
making it impossible for it to support its own weight. Alright,
so um again, it's like the volcano just has erupted
so much, and it grew so much, erupted so much
that it's just caved in on itself. It's just destroyed itself.
(34:39):
It's like if you you were too empty out all
of the molten lava from your molten lava cake and
then the cake just collapses. Right. All you have with
like the edges of the cake that form like like
ring mountain around a center. It's like a crater um.
And this is where we get that classic image of
what a volcano you usually looks like. If you draw
a cartoon volcano, you're probably drawing a ring shaped called
(35:00):
where the top of the mountain has collapsed after some
eruption in the past. But even though the the the
the mountain itself has collapsed, the underlying volcanic avict activity
is still there. So magma and volcanic gases continue to build,
and this can result in a few different varieties of caldera.
The center can swell back up into what is known
(35:20):
as a resurgent dome like with the yellow Stone, and
it's you know, it's so called supervolcano. But in the
case of Vesuvius, another volcanic cone and this is the
Mount of Vesuvius, rises up in the center of the
Soma Caldera. And this is why we call this type
of volcano a Soma volcano. So the remnants again of
(35:42):
the old mountain, the caldera, are still around it, and
the Soma Caldera is also sometimes referred to it's just
Mount Soma today. But again it is the remnant of
the old mountain and in the center is Vesuvius. That's
hard I mean volcano inside a volcano, right, and again
it's important to know, yeah, Vesuvia is certainly in geologic time,
is is a young volcano. Okay, So what sort of
(36:03):
volcano is Vesuvius itself. We'll remember we used the the
description a Soma strato volcano. So a strato volcano is
a steep conical volcano built from many layers of lava
ash pomis and tefra tefra that's a pyroclass or rejected
fragments from the volcano that have fallen to the ground.
All of this from various eruptions, building up, building up
(36:26):
this volcano. Now you mentioned it was a young volcano. Yes,
relatively young again in terms of geologic time. Uh, certainly
human time is a different matter, which we'll get into. Uh.
During its life, it's had periods of activity and inactivity.
Its most recent period of activity as of this recording
was between nineteen thirteen and nineteen forty four CE. And
(36:51):
today it's uh, you know it's it's it's inactive. You
rather inactive. You can actually hike up to the top. Uh.
It's eruptions, however, we're known in ancient times. But at
the time of its eruption in seventy nine C, it
had been inactive for at least two hundred and ninety
five years. It was reputed to have erupted into seventeen
(37:11):
b c E based on the writings of Solicitaicus, but
a great many modern writers have rejected this. We know
it sustained a particularly powerful eruption during the second millennium
b c E. This is the Avellino eruption, which decimated
the Bronze Age settlements in the area. Uh. But again
(37:32):
we it's ultimately a situation where we don't have a
lot of information about its pre about its activity in
pre seventy nine c e UH in that time period,
but we can presume that it had been centuries since
its last eruption. Avelino is the name of another town
nearby Naples, so it's actually I remember that because it's
the town that Tony Soprano's family comes from. Okay. At
(37:54):
any rate, enough time had passed for humans in this
region to lose their immediate fear the mountain um, and
so cities encroached upon its domain, gardens and vineyards popped
up around it. The children of Prometheus grew bold in
the silence of Vesuvius. But again it's it's clear that
they had not really completely forgotten what Vesuvius had been
(38:17):
capable of in the past. Myths of giants battling Hercules, uh,
you know, still remained about the mountain. Uh. There were
geologic connections that linked that clearly linked Vesuvius to Mount Etna,
which was certainly active and was described erupting again in
Virgils and need, which I referred to earlier. So it's
not like people did not know what had happened here
(38:41):
in the past, or what a volcano looked like, I mean,
there was it was the world wasn't completely ignorant of
what it could do. You know, it's kind of weird.
It's it's one of these tragedies of time scales that
humans are I feel like, almost constantly facing off against,
where if you look at the activity of a volcano
across geologic time, you just see it's pretty regular, you know,
(39:05):
pretty frequently this thing is going to erupt. But then
you zoom into human historical time and the eruptions are
not quite frequent enough to discourage settlement because our memories
are not that long, like a few hundred years. Seems like,
you know, an eternity to an individual person. Yeah, yeah,
I mean the whole whole lives will pass during the
(39:26):
periods of relative inactivity of a volcano, uh in many
of these cases. So you know, we don't know everything
about the seventy nine CE eruption a k a. The
plan a plan a in eruption named for plenty, but
but we still know quite a bit, as it was
again the first volcanic eruption to be described in detail.
(39:46):
We have plenty of the Younger's excellent descriptions of the
pre eruption, quakes, the eruption itself, the ash fall, pyroclastic flows,
and the resulting mild tsunami in the Bay of Naples.
It is estimated that the column of ash that rose
up into the sky towered some twenty miles or thirty
two kilometers, and then it ejected one cubic mile or
(40:07):
four cubic kilometers of ash in just something like nineteen hours.
Ten ft of tephra fell on Pompeii, pyroclastic flow buried
herculaneum under seventy five ft or twenty three ms of ash,
and will eventually look at what all of this meant
for the humans who resided in the impacted cities as well,
like on a biological level. I think we'll have to
(40:28):
get into that in the next episode. Yeah, it's also
been estimated that the eruption itself would have carried the
thermal energy of a hundred thousand Hiroshima atomic bombs, and
all of this would have lasted roughly two days. Vesuvius
has erupted some three dozen times since uh, sometimes with
deadly results. Mud flows and lava flows from a sixt
(40:51):
thirty one eruption killed, but some three thousand, five hundred people,
and today, as before the seventy nine CE eruption, vineyards
and orchards cover the slopes of the mountain. Uh, there's
an there's an enormous population surrounding the volcano today. I
believe the area is like the most densely populated part
(41:12):
of Italy. Right. I've also seen it described as the
as the most densely populated area surrounding a volcano on Earth.
But again, the yeah, people, but it's beautiful. You look
at these pictures, it's beautiful. There's an actually tremendous amount
of growth there. Again, the soil is very fertile um
and before the eruption of six thirty one, during a
very long period of inactivity, forests are actually said to
(41:34):
have grown in the crater, and you would have found
three lakes there as well. So yeah, given the the
amount of time, the great amount of time relative to
the human experience and even the lives of plants that
transpires between eruptions, I mean, you can have a great
greening of the mountain occur. Oh man, I wish I
could see what that was like to have the forests
(41:56):
and the lakes down in there, because I love that
kind of thing. I don't know if you've been the
Crater Lake in Oregon. I have not, Well, you've probably
seen images of it. At least it's absolutely gorgeous, one
of the most amazing beautiful places I've ever been. But
I think it's exactly that contrast of like of uh,
this clear still water and all these forests in life
just flooding in to this place where there was catastrophic destruction,
(42:21):
you know, some number of centuries ago, right, and then
that and then the humans come in as well, And
there's probably something elegant to be said about just like
the nature of of the human experience too, you know,
like even though something terrible happened here, humans have a
way in many cases of moving forward through it and
and finding a way to make a life there. I
know it's not this way, but it almost it seems
(42:43):
almost malicious, like the the the volcano with this fertile
volcanic soil is just sort of like baiting you. It
is like leaving out this bait to attract you into
the geologic trap. Sorry, I know that's anthropomorphizing. It's it's
not the volcane know, it's fault. It doesn't mean to
hurt you. Yeah, I think even Tolkien didn't say Mount
(43:05):
Doom itself was evil, right, it was just but Mount
Doom is more what you'd expect. It's in more door,
which is a place where even the air, the very
air you breathe as a toxic fume and nothing grows there.
And you know, it's just like it's just this blasted landscape.
I mean no, that this is the case where the
area right around this volcano that could erupt again is
extremely beautiful and fertile and inviting to life. All right,
(43:29):
On that note, we're gonna go ahead and call it
for this episode, but we will be back in the
next episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind to continue
our discussions regarding Vesuvious. We're gonna get into some of
the sort of forensic evidence of what happened to the
people in Pompeii. We're gonna get into We're gonna discuss
the possible remains of Plenty the Elder, and will also
(43:51):
just discuss the continued threat posed by volcanoes to settled
regions today and you know, and some some about you know,
what we what we're prepared to do or unprepared to
do about their eruptions. I can't wait. I've been wanting
to talk about this for so long. I'm so glad
we finally got here. Yeah, and I think it may
kick off even further UM further episodes that deal with
(44:13):
volcanoes and UH and human history. There's a there's a
lot of rich there's a lot of rich soil UH
that that is left behind by these UH. These often
cata cataclysmic events. In the meantime, if you want to
check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
you can find our show wherever you get your podcasts UM.
(44:33):
If you go to Stuff to Build your Mind dot com,
that will definitely redirect you to the I Heart page
for our show, where you can subscribe, you can download, etcetera,
and wherever you get the show. We encourage you to
do those things. Rate, review, subscribe. These are the things
you can do to help the show, as well as
just telling a a friend in the real world UH.
(44:55):
Just spread the word huge thanks as always to our
excellent audio producers sethnic Wis Johnson. If you would like
to get in touch with us with feedback on this
episode or any other to suggest topic for the future
or just to say hi. You can email us at
contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
(45:19):
to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radios.
How stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio
is at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows radi
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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