Kind: captions
Language: en
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in southern
Italy a city under
threat Naples flanked by two dangerous
volcano on one side
Vesuvius destroyer of ancient
Pompei none of them met with a peaceful
death they were were afraid they were
panicked and it was
terrifying and on the other campy
F an invisible monster that threatens 3
million people this is the most
dangerous Volcan in the
world now scientists are seeing
increases in volcanic
activity and are scrambling to unlock
the inner secrets of these volcanoes
before it's too
late there's no choice you just have
have to go to a place which is
relatively difficult to get
to can they find ways to predict the
next
eruption this is evidence of how fast
things change in this area can they save
this Jewel of Italy from another
disaster this volcano can erupt any time
even
tomorrow could Naples become the next
Pompei right now on
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more than a thousand volcanoes around
the world are
active driven by Earth's fiery interior
they can erupt at any
time blasting molten rock and Ash into
the sky with frightening power and
speed and unleashing deadly destruction
on those who live in their
Shadow volcanos have the power to kill
thousands in the blink of an
eye a stark warning for the people who
live
here in the beautiful Port City of
Naples in southern
Italy this ancient and vibrant
Metropolis of over 3 million people
might seem an ideal place to call
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home but looks can be
deceiving it's built right next to not
one but two active
volcanoes each has a history of
catastrophic eruptions
to the east is the well-known
Vesuvius a classic cone-shaped volcano
that has claimed thousands of
lives erupting as recently as
1944 and to the West is an almost
unknown
volcano campi
flr hidden below ground in an area where
hundreds of thousands thousands
live it doesn't even look like a
volcano and yet it has the potential to
be far more destructive than its more
famous
neighbor today there are ominous signs
that both volcanoes are still
active swirling clouds of gas and
bubbling pools of
mud
what do these mean about the likelihood
of a major
eruption it's hard to imagine the impact
on such a densely populated
city and yet it's happened
before just 15 mil from Central Naples
is the site of one of history's most
infamous volcanic
disasters
the Roman city of
Pompei in year 79 of the Common
Era Vesuvius exploded and buried the
entire city in over a dozen feet of
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Ash over the last 150 years
archaeologists have been carefully
uncovering The
Remains revealing a scene of Carnage and
death a city and its people frozen in
time at the exact moment an eruption
struck among these ruins are crucial
lessons about how a volcanic disaster
can
unfold and evidence of just how suddenly
an eruption can
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strike for archaeologist Kevin dyus this
human tragedy is a stark warning from
history walking around the ruins today
is really easy to forget that this was
actually a functioning Roman town 2,000
years ago within the city walls perhaps
15,000 people of different classes
different ethnic makeup
all trying to survive in this
city remarkably everyday items like food
survived the
eruption walnuts warn Kels I already
peeled you can see one of these food
items shows how the people of Pompei
were caught completely off guard when
vvus
erupted this one is one of the 81 breads
found inside an oven that was fully
operational at the moment of the
eruption with one pecularity there is
still the fingerprint from the baker the
baker th oh my gosh this really brings a
human element to this right bread being
baked at the time of the eruption and
the baker hopefully the baker escaped
hopefully he lived the rest of his days
baking bread so somewhere else but we
have no idea but it really tells us
something about the eruption how
unexpected it
was in the face of this sudden cataclysm
many of pompei's residents fled in blind
panic but some chose to stay behind and
shelter in the
city they paid the ultimate
price their last Des desate moments
preserved for eternity as pompei's most
evocative
remains these are but a few of the
approximately 2,000 victims that decided
to wait out the eruption and of course
didn't make it now what we have here are
not the bodies themselves but these are
the exact poses of the victims at the
very last last moments of their lives
after their death they recovered with
Ash over time the soft tissue decayed
liquefied and leaked through the ash
leaving Behind These
voids archaeologists pour in plaster of
Paris leave them to dry and we get these
exact
poses and this is a really maob reminder
of what can happen in the blink of an
eye to an entire city
could Vesuvius erupt today with such
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violence do millions of people risk the
same fate as their
ancestors centuries have passed but one
thing hasn't
changed vvus is still
active driven by a geological Collision
that has been shaping this part of Italy
for millions of
years to the east of Naples two of the
planet's vast tectonic plates are
crashing into each
other the African plate is being forced
downwards in a process called
subduction as it descends toward the hot
center of the earth it gets
warmer
this causes rocks to melt and turn into
liquid
magma which Rises towards the
surface to the east of Naples there are
weaknesses in the Rock here the magma
can break
through and if it has enough power it
can even trigger an
eruption
it's this constant subduction which
keeps Vesuvius active and fuels its
eruptions due to this everpresent danger
the volcano is kept under 24-hour
surveillance at the observatorio
vuo scientists are watching for the
warning signs of an imminent
eruption we have 1 million 500 people
that are at high risk in case of
eruption from a Hightech control center
Franchesca and her colleagues pick up
seismic
activity movements in the Earth's
crust in the screens we see all the
signals that came from the sensors that
we have installed on
Theus in all there are 150 sensors on
the volcano all listening for
earthquakes these can indicate if an
eruption is on the
way each eruption begins when magma
starts to rise upwards from deep in the
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Earth it pushes through weaknesses in
the Rocks towards the
surface if its way is blocked it builds
up more and more
pressure until it fractures the Rocks
apart this is so violent it generates
earthquakes which the scientists can
detect at the
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surface every time the magma breaks
through the rock it generates a new
Quake until the magma erupts out of the
volcano Franchesca and her colleagues
detect minor earthquakes nearly every
week and this constant monitoring is
vital Vesuvius can change very
quickly we have
active volcano and of course if a
volcano is active for sure it will erupt
again we don't know
when mindful of vesuvius's lethal past
the observatory scientists don't rely
solely on earthquake
monitoring they have another more
Hands-On way to monitor the
magma at the summit of Mount vuvi
is a vast
crater nearly a th000 ft
deep every month a monitoring team
carefully descends into this gaping hole
to gather
data today geologist Chris Jackson is
joining
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them some of the critical bits of data
about the volcano's Behavior and the the
kind of threat it composed
they can only be gotten from one
particular location so there's no choice
about trying to collect it somewhere
easy you just have to go to a place
which is relatively difficult to get
to their mission is to collect vital gas
samples these could hold clues about how
close the magma is to the
surface to get them they need to climb
down into the heart of vesuvius's
massive
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crater
their target is a
feral a gap in the rock where gases from
the magma
escape the team takes samples to measure
the levels of one of these gases carbon
dioxide what we're really interested in
here are spikes in carbon dioxide coming
out of the volcano because that spike in
carbon dioxide might mean that there's
new magma coming into the volcano which
could occur immediately before it erupts
Rising magma experiences less and less
pressure causing it to release more and
more carbon
dioxide the magma within a volcano is a
little like the soda within this soda
bottle both of them contain carbon
dioxide so CO2 dissolv within
them as the pressure
drops the gas comes out of
solution forming bubbles which can
escape to the surface the reasons the
bubbles came out of the SoDo is because
we released the pressure and the same
happens when magma rises up within a
volcano is that decreasing pressure that
allows the gas bubbles to expand and to
eventually come out the top of the
volcano constant monitoring of carbon
dioxide and earthquakes is vital to
predicting when vvus might erupt
again but this isn't enough to keep the
people of Naples safe
for that scientists also need to
understand the consequences of an
eruption who would be most at risk and
what dangers would they
face Clues can be uncovered by analyzing
past
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eruptions even if they happened 2,000
years ago
such as the annihilation of
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Pompei remarkably there was a
witness the Roman author plenny the
younger this is the very first
eyewitness account of a major volcanic
eruption on August 24th in the early
afternoon my mother Drew my uncle's
attention to a cloud of unusual size and
appearance its General appearance can be
best expressed as being like a pine
tree we don't think of a pine tree as an
analogy for the cloud of a volcanic
eruption but if you come to Italy if you
come to Campania and see the type of
pine tree that grows here you realize
that what plenty was describing is a
Perfect
Analogy in modern times scientists have
seen this same distinctive pine tree
shaped cloud again and
again called plen and eruptions these
are the most explosive and the most
lethal but how exactly did a plinian
eruption kill around 2,000 people in
Pompei volcanologist Claudio scarp potty
looks to the ash left behind for
clues in this deposit we see different
layers coarse layers fine layers these
different layers are different phases of
the
eruption the bottom layer was deposited
in the first phase of the
eruption it consists of pmus small
pieces of white volcanic
rock
amazingly their size can be used to
calculate how high the eruption
reached an indication of its
power the size of the particles is
proportional to the height of the column
taking these fragments all around the
volcano volcanologist were able to
define the height of the 79 ad eruption
column at 32 km High the Roman people
saw a column that was 32 times the
height of the
subus this was a massive
eruption gas and pmus exploded out at a
rate of over 1 and2 million tons every
second forming the distinctive Pine
tree-shaped cloud of a plinian
eruption this reached 21 mil high and
was so vast it blocked out the
sun then it rained pmus down on Pompei
and its inhabitants for 18 hours
solid surprisingly this sustained
bombardment actually gave people an
opportunity to escape
pmus is such a light rock it didn't
present much of a threat to those who
decided to
flee this fragment could hit you but
without any problem we know from peny
that if you just put a pillow on your
head you can survive this first phase of
the
eruption but strangely hundreds of
bodies have been excavated from this
layer of pus Fallout
meaning they died during this first
phase of the
eruption what killed
them one clue is the location of the
bodies most were found inside
buildings they had probably decided to
shelter in their homes rather than
flee many seem to have died from
traumatic fractures to their
skulls
clao thinks these deadly blows to the
Head are explained by the long duration
of sustained
Fallout 18 agonizing
hours these roofs were quite flat and so
p is accumulated and the overload was
too high and so the roof just
collapses if you stay inside the half
house and your the roof collaps on your
heads you are probably
killed killed and then
buried a warning for
today 2,000 years later neapolitans
still live in flat roofed
houses we see that the roof of the
buildings of the towns around vus are
still flat
so you could have the same effect and
overloading of the modern roof and so in
two three hour this wolf could
collapse the tragedy of Pompei warns of
the dangers of pus
Fallout but out of the 2,000 dead only
about a third died during this phase of
the
eruption so what killed the rest of the
victims once again the answers are in
the layers of volcanic ash vvus left
behind there is a sudden change from a
coarse layer of pmus to a band of fine
material just over 1 in
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thick this smooth layer is
characteristic of the dramatic next
phase of a plinian eruption
a ground hugging volcanic surge called a
pyroclastic
flow this is the deadliest outpouring of
volcano can
unleash it is an avalanche of gas and
rock moving it up to 300
mph
so why did vuia suddenly start to
produce a pyroclastic
flow in a plenon eruption the mass of
material in the column grows and
grows but there comes a point where
there is so much Rock and debris that
the eruption can no longer support all
this
weight the column collapses back towards
Earth creating an avalanche of debris
the pyroclastic
flow the column collapsed the gases and
the solids and everything moved down
like an
avalan imp Pompei the pyroclastic flow
crashed through the
buildings and inundated people
Sheltering inside in a dense blanket of
gas and fine
Ash this is what claimed most victims in
Pompei can you imagine the air being
replaced by an impossibly large cloud of
Ash and gas and trying so hard to fight
from breathing this in
here we have for example this individual
and how clearly you can see his right
hand pressed against his mouth he no
doubt had a cloth of some sort trying to
keep the ash from going into his lungs
and of course it did not work that Ash
meets your moist lung walls and clings
to it like plaster on this wall here and
that's the last
breath but the shape of some of the cast
suggest the pyroclastic flow killed in
an even more gruesome
way this cast in particular is
fascinating to me and what's so
interesting about it is the pose you can
see this individual died on his or her
back but the arms are up the legs are up
why is this this is known as the cavic
spasm and it usually occurs in
atmospheres of intense Heat
pyroclastic flows can reach temperatures
of hundreds of deges
fah this is what caused the victims to
contort into these strange
shapes so when this pyroclastic flow
surged over the city it caused the
muscles to contract and turn
inwards you can see it in many many of
these casts a lot of these individuals
display this cavic
spasm these people died
instantly the intense heat froze them at
the exact moment the pyroclastic flow
hit what happened to Pompei and its
people is a stark reminder of the
destructive power of
volcanoes and it could happen again
this is the reason that scientists have
to keep monitoring vesuvius's
activity but there is a far greater
threat to
Naples Vesuvius isn't the biggest or
most powerful volcano in
town on the other side of the city
scientists have seen an alarming
increase in volcanic
activity pelli a vast feral a vent of
bubbling gas and
mud in recent years it has grown larger
and turned into a
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destroyer a few 100 ft away expert in
volcanic risk Antonio Costa is visiting
a deserted
Building inside the walls and floors are
covered in a thick layer of solidified
ooze and the air is filled with the
acurate smell of
sulfur this uh building up to 10 15
years ago was like a sort of club with
as women pool there there was a
bar were pushed to abandon this place
because it's not anymore in
habitable the volcanic vent has claimed
the entire
building this hostile takeover began
when gas from the vent punched holes
through the floor and
walls here you can even feel if you put
the hand here
ah it's terribly
hot as the gas cools it releases
dissolved
minerals these stick together to form
the thick volcanic scum which is now
consuming the entire
house this is a clearly evidence of how
fast things change in this
area so where is the volcano that is
driving all this activity
the vent is in an area called campy
flra which is home to hundreds of
thousands of
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people at first glance it's hard to spot
the
volcano unless you have a trained
eye so let me think of volcano as we
think of that Vesuvius the perfect
conical shape with that beautiful crater
on top
but at camper F here there's also some
evidence that this is a volcano but it's
it's just far more
subtle good yeah to take a better look
at the lay of the land Chris needs to
take to the
air a monitor connected to a drone
provides him with a bird's eyee view of
campy
f
so the first thing you notice from up in
the air is as we come round to the Shor
line towards the Bay of Naples we start
to pick up a prominent Ridge line it
comes all the way around towards the
main city center it's clearly curved and
then within there it's a very densely
populated flat area here this Ridge line
could be telling us something about a
feature that is actually forming this
landscape an ancient very large volcano
and in particular we're actually looking
at a
Caldera a Caldera is a collapsed
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volcano in the past campy flra was a
flat
plane deep beneath was a huge reservoir
of bubbling
magma then the magma started moving
upwards smashing through weaknesses in
the rock and erupting
powerfully but this left an empty void
beneath the
surface with nothing left to support the
weight of the plane it collapsed
downwards forming a crater known as a
calara radioactive d in of rocks reveals
that campi flra's Caldera formed 15,000
years
ago and at nearly 8 mil wide it must
have been created by an incredibly large
and Powerful
eruption volcanologist jepe Mastro
Lorenzo thinks this sounds a warning for
modern-day
Naples it is very important to study the
past eruption uh in order to uh imagine
a scenarios for the next eruption uh
because in geology what happened in the
past will happen also in the
future the remains of the eruption that
formed campi flr Caldera can be found
beneath the streets of downtown
Naples here there is a Labyrinth of
narrow
passageways
these were handcut thousands of years
ago to provide building materials for
Naples today they are a treasure Trove
of information about the
eruption this is the Neapolitan neot
formation here underground Naes we have
several tens of meters of this
formation this rock has a powdery
consistency which points to the most
deadly event in an
eruption here you can see the fine
Matrix of fine particles of Ash this is
typical of parastic
Flows In Pompei the pyroclastic flow
which killed more than a thousand people
left behind a layer of Ash just over 1
in thick
but here beneath the very center of
Naples the thickness of the pyroclastic
flow reaches over 300
ft this eruption is about 10 times
bigger than the Pompei 79 ad eruption if
another eruption like this will occur in
the future all the people and buildings
of Naples will be buried under under
hundreds of meters of
otash so nothing can resist these
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eruption in campi flra there are
hundreds of thousands of people living
directly on top of an active
volcano if it erupts deadly Ash Fallout
and pyroclastic flows could even hit
downtown Naples
with so many lives at stake the pressure
is on to determine when this volcano May
erupt
next so scientists are keeping an eye on
pole the biggest town inside Camp flr
Caldera this is the site of an ancient
Roman
marketplace
remarkably these ruins could point to a
way of predicting the next
eruption within the remains is evidence
of dramatic ground
movements the clues we're looking for we
can see here on the three marble columns
and you notice that after about 10 to 20
ft above their bases all three columns
are full of small
holes these were holes produced by clams
they like to burrow into the marble to
form
colonies the clams that made these holes
can't survive on dry land they live
solely Under the
Sea so at some point these columns must
have been
underwat now we know from studies across
the Mediterranean that the sea level has
only changed at most about a few feet
since Roman
times if the sea level hasn't changed
there is only one other
possibility it must be the land that has
risen and
Fallen this whole area must have sunk
into the sea and then come back up again
at least once since Roman
times in fact the ground in the Caldera
has a history of rising and
falling and eruptions are known to
follow periods of intense
uplift eyewitness accounts describe that
in
1538 The Ground Rose
rapidly 2 Days Later a minor eruption
created this crater called Monte noovo
on the outskirts of
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pole in 1982 the ground around the town
began to rise again very quickly
this prompted fears of an imminent
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eruption tisana vorio lived on the
outskirts of pole during this period and
remembers the chaos it
caused the first thing that became
unusable was the harbor because of the
uplift the ocean uh floor became so
shallow so that the ferry could not
talk over the the next 2 years the
ground lifted up nearly 6
ft then the earthquake
started on April 1st
1984 more than 500 shocks overnight
struck the town of
buoli fearing the worst the authorities
stepped
in as the seismic activity kept
increasing in the area the town of PSI
was evacuated people had to flee their
own town because of the fear of an
impending
eruption puty overnight became a ghost
town but strangely the eruption never
came 2 years later people were allowed
to return to their homes but a big
question
remained why hadn't campe f
erupted today tisana is a rock
physicist and she's trying to answer
this very question this is a good one hi
guys one thing pick always my
curiosity why a place can withstand such
large and sustained
deformation so we had to understand why
uh the rocks of the Caldera behave this
way
one mile below the surface of campe F's
Caldera is a layer of hard Stone known
as cap
Rock could this rock contain an
explanation for why the ground Rose and
fell so much without an eruption
happening we want to understand how this
rock would behave uh in the Caldera
under the conditions uh of temperature
and pressure they experienc in the Cera
a specialized chamber mimics these
conditions and also subjects the samples
to extreme
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stress what she finds is that The Rock
doesn't snap or fail
instantly it actually
bends what we can see is that the c rock
is capable of withstanding high level of
stresses but also it shows from this
Bell shape a docti behavior which means
this rock is not
brittle this finding may explain what
happened in PSU in the
1980s magma started moving towards the
surface where ad heated fluids trapped
in the ground
above these expanded pushing up the cap
rock as it was ductile it was flexible
and bent
upwards this put stress on the cap Rock
which began to
fracture generating the
earthquakes but it didn't crack
completely it could still resist the
uplift and prevent an
eruption tisana wondered why the cap
Rock had such unusual strength
looking under a high-powered microscope
she was surprised to find something you
don't normally see in
stone The Rock had formed a network of
fibers that were knitted
together the presence of fibers was
really an intriguing Discovery because
the fibers are intertwined or braided
together like the strands in a
rope tisana thinks these ropeik fibers
are the secret of the cap Rock's
strength because she also sees them in a
man-made material famous for its
durability and
toughness the same fibers that you can
see here come from Roman
concrete the strength of Roman concrete
is one reason so many of their
structures survive to this
day tougher and more durable than modern
day concrete
it was the Roman's go-to construction
material and the secret ingredient in
Roman
concrete volcanic ash called pelana
mined in campi
gr the Romans combin this with other
ingredients to form their
concrete remarkably it seems a similar
chemical process takes place a mile
Below in the volcano on under
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pole the cap rock is a natural version
of Roman
concrete its strength may have prevented
campi F from erupting in the
1980s but this strength is also a
liability to fracture the cap Rock
completely would require colossal
force and that would result in an
incredibly powerful
eruption having a c rock that has high
strength and Datil can be a blessing and
a curse in a
Caldera today campy flra's cap rock is
once more under
stress since 2005 the ground has been
rising out of the
sea and scientists think that the
protective cap rock is being
weakened at pelli there is a shift in
the gases bubbling up from Camp flra's
magma the Fest gas that is released is
carbon
dioxide when most of the carbon dioxide
is escaped the magma start to
release increasing amount of water of
steam steam is the Achilles heel of the
all important cap
Rock because when steam condenses to
water it releases large amounts of
heat which starts to fracture The Rock
the rocks that cover the magma become
weaker they so could fa inter
eruption a catastrophe in the making for
Naples and the 3 million residents
threatened by an eruption of campi
flr faced with this Prospect The
Observatory has enhanced its early
warning
system installing additional sensors
across the Caldera
we have sensor to measure ground
deformations to measure anomalies in
gravity to measure the uh geochemical
activity the temperature of the ferals
and so
on if there are big anomalies you have
more probability that an eruption is
approaching and the scientists are about
to add an ingenious new detector to
their early warning
system this will offer Naples a unique
form of
protection it's the brainchild of Luca
de
Sienna to see how the volcano is
changing deep underground he uses sound
waves you could use Dynamite or any sort
of explosion to produce the way but
that's obviously impossible in a
metropolitan area of 1.5 million people
instead Luca found a surprising and less
disruptive source of sound waves one
that's already in place and operating
24/7 it was quite astonishing when we
discovered that we could use just the
noise that the sea is producing at whole
time to see inside the
volcano as the sea crashes into the
shore it produces a
soundwave that in turn propagates
through the The
Ground by measuring the velocity of the
wave Luca can tell the kind of material
it is
encountering if it's traveling quickly
it's passing through solid
rock but if it slows down it's likely to
be passing through fluids like
magma measuring the velocity of
different waves crossing the Caldera
Luca has built up a 3D picture of what
lur Works beneath can't be FL
gr we gathered three years of data and
what we got is this map where we have
found a sort of circular area which is
low velocity low velocity means that
likely there are hot fluids inside this
area this could be
magma for the first time scientists can
see where the hot fluids are across the
entire
Caldera we know that most of the fluid
come just under our feet actually here
under the port in
pool but to know if an eruption is on
the way Luca needs to be able to see if
magma and hot fluids are rising towards
the
surface for that level of detail he will
have to expand the
network when it's up and running Naples
will be the first city in the world able
to track these movements in real
time if we measured this parameter all
across the Calera and we see that this
parameter is changing over here that's a
marker that a possible eruption may
happen this Cutting Edge early warning
system could be the best way of
protecting
Naples it could buy people vital time to
escape
an unexpected plinian eruption of campy
flra would put millions of lives at
risk in this nightmare scenario the
eruption could generate a huge Cloud
reaching tens of miles into the
sky pelting the Bay of Naples with
pmus then when the column collapses a
massive pyroclastic flow heated to
hundreds of degrees fah would tear
across the Caldera at hundreds of miles
an
hour killing everyone in its
path and burying Naples in an avalanche
of
Ash all this area will be devastating
and three million of people will uh be
killed by the par classy
flows the people of the Bay of Naples
could suffer the same fate as the people
of
Pompei unless they remember one of the
key lessons of this ancient
tragedy those who hunker down during an
eruption are the ones most likely to
die if you have a stronger option
the only way to save the people is
evacuation we need to evacuate because
is the only way we can prevent a
disaster because there is no way you can
save people for a from a parastic
flows if evacuation is the only option
this will take time and
planet in Naples millions of people are
crammed into a city of narrow and
crowded
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streets making advanced warning
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essential one day there will be another
volcanic
eruption perhaps even more powerful than
the one that wiped out
Pompei but as scientists improve their
prediction and early Warning
Systems the next next time there will be
a crucial
difference they'll know an eruption is
on the way ahead of
time allowing millions of people to
escape with their
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lives
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[Applause]
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