Why care? Can it change any thing?

How can learning about Pompeii, a city destroyed so long ago, change things for people today?

Well, there were the warnings. People just didn't know how to interpret them. They were accustomed to daily earthquakes. They didn't realized that the increasing intensity of the earthquakes meant something bigger was on the way.

We seem to learn the hard way about things. Today people have published safety tips about living near volcanoes. Even with this knowledge people still seem to build towns near an active volcano, and sometimes those towns are abandoned after an eruption, like this one near Soufriere Hills Volcano in the West Indies.

Warnings help us to understand what it coming, and how to protect people in the immediate area. Learning to understand those warnings are what geologists do.

National Geographic has a library of videos about Volcanoes. Scroll down the page and find the link that says "Volcano Eruptions" and watch how terrible a volcano can be.