The French geologist Alfred Lacroix arrived at the destroyed Caribbean city of Saint-Pierre six weeks after Mount Pelée had killed 28,000 people in two minutes. He spent four years reconstructing what had happened. What did he name the previously-unrecognised phenomenon he identified?
Lacroix coined *nuée ardente* — the modern technical term is *pyroclastic density current* — for the fast-moving, ground-hugging cloud of superheated gas and ash that had killed Saint-Pierre. His 1904 book *La Montagne Pelée et ses Éruptions* is the foundational text of modern volcanology. Plinian columns had been recognised since Pliny the Younger's account of Vesuvius in 79 AD; lahars and calderas were already named features. The substantive Lacroix contribution was identifying — for the first time, on observational evidence — that horizontal pyroclastic flows existed and could be the principal killing mechanism of a volcanic eruption.
Read the full story →Alfred Lacroix arrived on Martinique six weeks after the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée had killed thirty thousand people. He spent the next four years on the island reconstructing exactly what had happened. The science of volcanology, more or less, is what he found.
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