Pompeii: The Last Day......
Jan. 31st, 2005 01:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1First question: Who else out there watched it last night (i.e. Sunday night)? I know they've been plugging the daylights out of it this past month on many of the cable channels.
I thought it was quite an interesting show. The first hour and 15 minutes re-created the day Vesuvius blew in 79 AD (or 79 CE), based on the one eyewitness account that survived, and scientific conjecture based on what was unearthed since then. I didn't see any credits, but I thought the CGI was very well done. And I leaned a new word: "pyroclastic", which describes the speeding flow of hot ash and cooled lava down a volcano.
The descriptions of how the people died were graphic and horrific. The only comforting part was that their deaths were instantaneous (if encountering the pyroclastic) or quickly (asphyxiation).
The second 45 minutes brought us up to the present day, and cautioned that such an event could happen again in the next 100 years. If it does, how would we know in advance? And how would the current citizens of Pompeii and the other towns surrounding the volcano get out in time?
Here's the page for the show on the Discovery Channel's website.
I thought it was quite an interesting show. The first hour and 15 minutes re-created the day Vesuvius blew in 79 AD (or 79 CE), based on the one eyewitness account that survived, and scientific conjecture based on what was unearthed since then. I didn't see any credits, but I thought the CGI was very well done. And I leaned a new word: "pyroclastic", which describes the speeding flow of hot ash and cooled lava down a volcano.
The descriptions of how the people died were graphic and horrific. The only comforting part was that their deaths were instantaneous (if encountering the pyroclastic) or quickly (asphyxiation).
The second 45 minutes brought us up to the present day, and cautioned that such an event could happen again in the next 100 years. If it does, how would we know in advance? And how would the current citizens of Pompeii and the other towns surrounding the volcano get out in time?
Here's the page for the show on the Discovery Channel's website.
