Ash: Why Volcanoes Kill, and How We Learned to Watch Them

Almost nobody at Pompeii was killed by the falling stone. The city had twelve hours to leave, and most of it did. Herculaneum, four kilometres closer to the crater, received almost no ash at all, and died faster than anyone in Pompeii. A lake in Cameroon killed 1,746 people in a single night without erupting. A mountain in Indonesia took the summer away from New England a year later. Ash tells the great volcanic disasters hour by hour, and explains the mechanism inside each one. Every chapter starts with something that happened to real people and ends with the physics that did it. Inside you will find: - The prisoner who outlived a city because his cell walls were a metre thick - Why volcanic ash melts inside a jet engine and freezes again on the turbine - The mudflow that arrives two hours after the eruption, ten times the size it started - The lake that exhaled, and killed everything in the valley below it - Why the lava at one mountain in the Congo runs faster than you can - The hazard map that named the doomed town five weeks before it was destroyed - The film that persuaded sixty thousand people to walk away from Pinatubo >Twenty-seven short chapters, each with its own hand drawn diagram, a box of surprising facts, and a closing thought. The book ends with a quiz. For readers of Simon Winchester and anyone who has ever looked at a mountain and wondered what it would take.