Horrifying simulation shows what happened when giant volcano erupted and destroyed Pompeii in seconds

A horrifying animation showed the terrifying final moments that the people of Pompeii experienced when the volcano erupted.

The Pompeii disaster of 79 AD is something that most people are fascinated by.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy, has been regarded as one of the deadliest eruptions in history and killed around 16,000 unsuspecting citizens who lived underneath.

Not only would it have been the most horrifying noise to encounter, but looking up would only prove to be a thing of nightmares as the towns realized that they were about to meet their deaths.

Those who were unfortunate enough to be unable to escape the death trap would have been bombarded with clouds of super-heated gases, molten rock that hailed from the skies and hot ash that scorched everything it touched.

It's not an ideal way to die and is probably one of the worst ways to go.

The catastrophic event destroyed multiple Roman towns and settlements and buried citizens beneath pyroclastic flows, which sealed them and artefacts in their own mini casing tombs.

If you've never seen a volcano of that magnitude erupt with 100,000 times the thermal energy of the atomic bombs dropped in Japan in WW2, you're not alone because if you did, you're unlikely to have escaped in time.

If you're morbidly interested in what it would have been like to experience, here's the video:

Then the Grand Palais museum in Paris decided to showcase the horror of the ancient event to people in 2020, visitors probably didn't know what to expect.

Digital Projection teamed up with French integrator ETC Onlyview to bring the exhibition to the museum, which showed the historical city, before, after, and most terrifyingly, during the dramatic eruption.

Unfortunately, the exhibition has now closed so you are out of luck if you do happen to be bopping about Paris.

But thanks to the magic of social media, people have been able to view the animation that drew people to the museum.

X/ItalyinFrance

In 2020, the Italian Embassy in France shared a snippet of the eruption animation on its X (formerly Twitter) page.

The animation shows what it would have looked like for the towns beneath when the volcano erupted and the few seconds of life they had left before they were overcome by pyroclastic flows.

After the eruption, a plume of black smoke is seen billowing out of the volcano before molten rocks fall on the city below.

From the view of the animation, the pyroclastic flows can be seen rapidly moving down the mountain before consuming the house.

X/ItalyinFrance

The city and eruption itself has fascinated scientists and archaeologists since it's discovery and both Pompeii and Herculaneum are massive points of interest and tourism in Naples, Italy.

The sites have fully intact streets, with some of them even having murals inside the buildings, being very well preserved - even intact in some places.

However, it's best to not take anything from these sites - which is what happened to one tourist who took a piece of 'cursed' volcanic rock from the site before swiftly returning it.