| Quotation of the day |
| “There’s a massive amount of carbon that’s in the ground, that’s built up slowly over thousands and thousands of years. It’s been in a freezer, and that freezer is now turning into a refrigerator.” |
| — Max Holmes, deputy director of the Woods Hole Research Center, on the thawing permafrost in Alaska. |
| Back Story |
| We often go back in history for our back stories, but today we’re going way back. |
| Mount Vesuvius erupted on this day in 79 A.D., burying the Roman town of Pompeii under a heap of ash, rocks and pumice. |
 Casts of victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii, Italy. Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times |
| Most of what we know of the event we owe to Pliny the Younger, who described it in a letter to the Roman historian Tacitus. According to the account, in the early afternoon that day, Pliny’s mother told his uncle, Pliny the Elder, that “a cloud which appeared of a very unusual size and shape” was approaching. |
| “I cannot give you a more exact description,” Pliny the Younger wrote of the cloud, “than by likening it to that of a pine tree, for it shot up to a great height in the form of a very tall trunk, which spread itself out at the top into a sort of branches.” |
| Pliny the Elder set off by boat to explore the cloud’s source, encountering “black pieces of burning rock” along the way. Yet he continued onward, reportedly telling his pilot, “Fortune favors the bold.” |
| The maxim, however — at least that day — proved false. |
| “He suffocated,” his nephew wrote, “by some gross and noxious vapor.” |