🏺 Why there is charred wood in Herculaneum, while Pompein does not ?

 Why there is charred wood in Herculaneum, while Pompein does not ?

Visiting Herculaneum one immediately grasps a detail that is not easy to find when visiting Pompeii, the charred wood. But how is it possible that two cities only a few kilometers apart and both destroyed by the same eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. preserve very different elements from each other?

Here, I want to give you the explanation to this frequent question that so many people ask.

The answer lies in the mode of the eruption that affected both cities!!! Yes, because although they were buried during the same eruption, the mode of burial was different.

Let's start by saying what happened on that August 24 or probably according to recent discoveries on October 24 of 79 AD.

The eruption that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum

The eruption, as Pliny the Younger tells us in his letters to his friend Tacitus, began around 1 p.m. Ash and lapilli (pumice) began to pour out of the crater of Vesuvius, which, driven by winds blowing southeast, struck Pompeii.

City was completely submerged with about 3 meters of volcanic materials, in contrast to Herculaneum, which due to its position west of the crater was, on the other hand, spared from the fall of pumice.

The following morning, however, the eruption took a turn, no more ash and lapilli came out of Vesuvius but a burning cloud (the pyroclastic flows). Characterized by gas, water vapor at very high temperatures and ash rose to the sky and collapsed along the slopes of the volcano. Cloud first engulfed Herculaneum, which had initially been spared by the eruption, and then later the other Vesuvian cities.

The fiery cloud that hit Herculaneum unlike Pompeii, reached an estimated temperature of about 500°C and instantly killed the inhabitants who had taken refuge along the beach and in boat warehouses. Virtually nothing was left of them but their bones due to the vaporization of soft tissue caused by the extremely high temperatures of the flow. The same fate befell other organic materials such as the wood present in Herculaneum.

In fact, the high heat and absence of oxygen due to the rapid burial with mud (creating a kind of vacuum) allowed, the perfect preservation of the wood in carbonized form, instead of its complete combustion.

And this explains why in Herculaneum it is possible to see charred wood remains that are not preserved, in contrast, in Pompeii.