3. LAVA IS THE LEAST OF YOUR WORRIES.
Lava generally moves too slowly to be the biggest threat from an eruption—but that’s not the case with pyroclastic flows. These super-hot, fast-moving currents of gas and tephra did in history’s most famous volcano victims: the residents of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The flow that hit Herculaneum was as hot at 500 degrees—enough to boil brains and vaporize flesh—while the later, cooler wave that hit Pompeii “cooked” people’s flesh, as the BBC puts it, but left their bodies intact; they were preserved by the falling volcanic ash.
