Saturday, November 14, 2020

Week 4 - Mount Vesuvius - Cory Hall

     When I think of a volcano, the one that instantly comes to mind is Mount Vesuvius. To me, it is notorious for frequent, massive, and devastating eruptions. So I am (virtually) travelling there this week. Mount Vesuvius is a volcano situated on a line of volcanoes created by the convergence of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates (Ball, 2005). This is important to the growth and development of a volcano because as the plates converge, or move towards one another, the water saturated African plate caused the melting point of the rocks above it to decrease, therefor causing magma to push upwards (Lutgens, Tarbuck, Tasa, 2016). This volcano poses huge threats to immediate communities as it's eruptions have been very explosive, called Plinian eruptions (Ball, 2005). Some eruptions have been so big that ash has been seen roughly 750 miles away in Istanbul (Wikipedia, 2020). Mount Vesuvius has the potential to be the most devastating volcano if it were to erupt with 3 million people living close enough to be effected, and 600,000 in the danger zone (Wikipedia.org, 2020). Although the warning signs of an eruption are easy to decipher to a trained eye, this volcano, with it's active and violent history, could erupt at any time.


Reference:

Ball, J. (2005). Mount Vesuvius - Italy. Retrieved November 15, 2020, from https://geology.com/volcanoes/vesuvius/

Lutgens, F. K., Tarbuck, E. J., & Tasa, D. (2016). Essentials of geology. Hoboken, NJ: Pearson.

Mount Vesuvius. (2020, November 07). Retrieved November 15, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vesuvius

Massimo Finizio - 2001

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