Whats in Vesuvius Belly?
Lava! And lots of it! That’s right. According to a team of European researchers, a giant pool of magma (what lava is called when it is underground) lies beneath Mt. Vesuvius, the volcano that buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in a.d. 79. The molten reservoir is at least 390 square kilometers in size and lies 8 km below the surface, under some of the most scenic coastline in Italy. It stretches from the nearby Apennine Mountains to the Phlegraean Fields—the series of volcanic structures upon which the city of Naples is built. “It was really unexpected for the reservoir to be that size—so very wide and large,” says Paolo Gasparini (University of Naples), the lead researcher. The scientists determined the size of the molten pool by setting off a series of explosions in the earth and then monitoring the seismic signals—a technique called seismic tomography. The echoes they got back from their explosions were used to build a three-dimensional picture—sort of like the way so
