We've all heard of the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD and its famed destruction of the cities Pompeii and Herculaneum. However, new research published in the New England Journal of Medicine presents an interesting outcome of the eruption: upon studying the remains of a victim's skull, the research team extracted what appeared to be fragments of a black, glass-like material. Could this victim's brain have been turned into glass?
Getty Images Credit: DHuss; A snow capped Mount Vesuvius and the remains of the city of Pompeii
The researcher teams studying remains at a Herculaneum site concluded that the victim's brain had undergone vitrification, the transformation of a substance into glass; and this discovery appears to be the first of its kind! The vitrified tissue was not found at other locations in the archaeological site.
The bodily remains were buried in volcanic ash and researchers speculate that the victim, most likely a man in his mid-20s, was killed instantly. Analyses of items near the remains showed that temperatures in the vicinity reached a high of 520C. That's 932 degrees fahrenheit!
The report concludes that very high heat ignited the victim's body fat and was followed by a quick decrease in the temperature, vaporizing vulnerable tissue and vitrifying the brain.
These unique brain fragments were collected from the victim's skull which had split open due to the eruption's high heat, and they tell an interesting story of how a brain turned to glass.