The volcano had creaked and grunted back in 1792, and had showered the northern lobe of Martinique with fine ash once in 1851. Its gently Geologists had only a rudimentary understanding of volcanology at the time, based almost entirely on the historical eruptions of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius, according to the French geologist Jean-Claude Tanguy. Mt. Witnesses said Pelée’s summit seemed to catch fire, spewing glowing rocks and rendering the midnight sky incandescent. Ships in the harbor smoldered and sank. In a The catastrophe led geologists to invent a term for the blast that destroyed the city.
The debris then spilled into the ocean, producing a 3-meter-high tsunami that inundated St. Pierre.Perhaps most horrifying of all, though, was the plague of insects and snakes that slithered down from the mountain, disturbed by its paroxysms. Most of the victims perished from suffocation and burns that scorched their skin and lungs. It’s part of an active island arc that traces the boundary where oceanic crust subducts beneath the Caribbean Plate, forming a lush, perforated barrier between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.One of these volcanoes, Mount Pelée, sat just 7 kilometers from St. Pierre and soared almost 1,400 meters above the city. )One witness, Victor Albert, watched the explosion from his field and described the ensuing events to the French newspaper La Croix: “A flash more dazzling than a lightning happened … At the same time, a cloud that formed on the summit of Montagne [Mount] Pelée literally fell on Saint-Pierre with such rapidity that it was impossible for anyone to escape.”The explosion leveled the town, hurling massive stone statues several meters from their perches — implying the cloud reached speeds exceeding 100 meters per second — and sparing only some walls oriented parallel to the blast. The eruption of Mount Pelee was the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century. Pelée, whose name is a French term meaning “Bald,” consists of layers of volcanic ash and lavas. Die Stadt lag in einer malerischen Bucht die im Nordwesten von den schroffen Felsen der "Montagne Pelée" eingefasst wurde. Moments later, all but a handful of its nearly 30,000 residents were dead, including the governor, who had come with his family to reassure the population. For days afterward, St. Pierre burned. Pelée, franciául: Montagne Pelée, jelentése kopasz hegy) egy aktív tűzhányó Martinique szigetének északi végén. Montagne Pelée: der katastrophale Vulkanausbruch von 1902 Martinique mit der Inselhauptstadt Saint Pierre war einmal als "die Perle der Karibik" bekannt.
Yet, these unsettling omens did not go completely unnoticed by the town’s residents.“This morning the whole population of the city is on the alert, and every eye is directed toward Mount Pelée, an extinct volcano,” wrote Clara Prentiss, the wife of the American consul in St. Pierre, in a letter to her sister. The event marked the only major volcanic disaster in the modern history of France and its overseas territories. When rescuers eventually did enter the ruins, they pulled from a jail cell the most famous survivor of the disaster, Louis-Auguste Cyparis, who later toured with the Barnum and Bailey Circus.But as the smoke cleared, scientists began to wonder what exactly happened on Mount Pelée.
(Subsequent analyses based on burnt wood yielded temperature estimates suggesting the gas cloud was between 350 and 400 degrees Celsius. The Mt. No one suspected that these convulsions stemmed from magma rising from the bowels of the volcano and affecting groundwater. Even there, however, things were amiss: The Rivière Blanche on Pelée’s southwest flank, which emptied into the sea just north of town, had been fluctuating wildly, sometimes overtopping its banks, other times disappearing completely. Volcanologists have identified three different phases in the evolution of Mount Pelée volcano: initial, intermediate, and modern.A second stage, now called the intermediate phase, started around 100,000 years ago, after a long period of quiescence. But St. Pierre had a problem: it lay in the shadow of a massive volcano.Like most of the Lesser Antilles, Martinique was built by volcanoes. It culminated in another "spine" or lava plug, albeit smaller than the 1902 plug, being emplaced at the summit. Situated 15 miles (24 km) northwest of Fort-de-France, it reaches an elevation of 4,583 feet (1,397 metres). Pelée May 8, 1902 eruption has the most notable number of causalities for a volcanic eruption in the 20th century. Der Inselbogenvulkan ist der höchste Berg der Insel. Mount Pelée, active volcanic mountain on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Mt. This time, there was no hesitation on the part of authorities and the danger area was immediately evacuated.