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Wednesday 16 July 2014

HISTORY


Heads Literally Exploded During the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius

Italy's Mount Vesuvius is infamous mainly for erupting so hard on Pompeii's face that the entire Roman city (and all its dick sculptures, since it was the sex capital of the empire) remained buried in ash for the next millennium and a half. What you may not know is that the gods were actually merciful to Pompeii compared with the horror that went down in Herculaneum, which was a smaller city situated even closer to Vesuvius when it started ejaculating magma everywhere.
Erik Moller
Pictured, from left to right: Vesuvius, Herculaneum, and Pompeii.
What Pompeii experienced was a classic disaster flick: huge cloud of smoke, people running, blanketing ash, and maybe a subplot about Tara Reid reconnecting with her ex-husband and showing some sideboob. Herculaneum, on the other hand, experienced a full-blown supernatural horror movie due to them being hit with "superheated pyroclastic flows of molten rock, mud, and gas," which is a fancy way of saying that a whole bunch of people went like this:
Seriously. The human skull is loaded with lots of liquids, and if you heat it up super quickly, it reacts much like a hamster in a microwave. We know this because that's precisely what happened at Herculaneum when everyone in the city was hit by a cloud of gas with a temperature of nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. In less than two-tenths of a second, "skin vaporized, ... brains boiled, and skulls exploded." Like, without any shotguns or grape shot. It just happened all on its own, just as Mother Nature intended. From the inside.
Here's hoping this doesn't happen to the fine folks in Naples, who stubbornly insist on living in the precise spot where Vesuvius patiently waits to wipe them out again.

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