Just a few miles from fabled Pompeii is Herculaneum, another city buried and frozen in time by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Today, geo-archeologists are chipping away at the soft rock, revealing that this city, unlike Pompeii, was not suffocated by falling ash. Rather, it was engulfed by blistering pyroclastic flows that instantly caused muscles to contract, skin to vaporize and heads to explode.