The Horrifying Mistake That Trapped the People of Pompeii

On a single day in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erased the Roman city of Pompeii — and then preserved it, frozen mid-breath, for more than fifteen centuries. This is the hour-by-hour story of the eruption, the people who fled and the people who stayed, and the haunting casts that still hold their final moments. Sources: the eyewitness letters of Pliny the Younger and the archaeological record of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Cataclysm — How worlds end.