Extreme Heat of Vesuvius Eruption Turned a Man's Brain to 'Glass'
“It’s the very first time that vitrified brain remains have been found,” Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Naples Federico II, said.
A man who died in Herculaneum during the historic Vesuvius eruption was found with an exploded skull and glass-like brain tissue.
Nearly two millennia after that deadly eruption in A.D. 79, a team of Italian researchers has found that there’s more of him left than just his bones. The heat of the eruption, they said, turned the victim’s brain into glass.
Shards of solid black material found on his skull, they wrote in Thursday’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, underwent a process called vitrification: Extreme high temperatures from the volcano liquefied the man’s brain, which then cooled quickly and turned into bits of glass.
Fragment of glassy black material extracted from the cranial cavity of a victim of the volcanic eruption at Herculaneum in the year 79. (Image: © The New England Journal of Medicine 2019)
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