Srilanka, Feb. 2 -- It started out as another day in the year 79 CE for the residents of Pompeii, a city in picturesque Southern Italy; the men were probably visiting cafes and bathhouses, while the children attended classes in a shady portico. But unbeknownst to them a behemoth nearby was brewing a volcanic outburst that eventually inundated the city and its residents in a mass of volcanic ash, preserving these terrified human remains exactly as they may have been many thousands of years ago on that fateful day.

The earliest eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius comes from the Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Younger. He wrote two letters to the historian Tacitus which are said to be the primary sources for the erupt...