The horrific eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the same one that engulfed the city of Pompeii, was so intense that it turned at least one poor person’s brain into glass, according to new research.
You know the story of Pompeii. It was a Roman city near Naples, Italy, filled with citizens doing whatever Roman citizens did in the year 79. Their routines were interrupted when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted, laying waste to Pompeii.
It forever entombed its citizens in volcanic ash, turning them into statues that freeze-framed them at the moment of their death. But people forget that, for as much destruction as Vesuvius caused the city of Pompeii, it also laid waste to the nearby city of Herculaneum.
The two cities are so close that it’s only a 20-minute drive from one to the other by today’s automotive standards, a drive that at all times has Vesuvius looming ominously on the northern horizon.
Mount Vesuvius Turned One Man’s Brain to Glass
Among the remains found in Herculaneum was the entombed body of a man who was lying in bed. The volcanic ash preserved his skeleton. When researchers dug into his skull they made an unsettling yet kind of beautiful discovery: what was left of his brain had been turned into glass.
Real quick lesson on glass: glass is formed when molten sand is rapidly cooled. It can occur naturally when lightning strikes a desert dune. The process can be emulated in manufacturing to create your car windows or your bathroom mirror.
Brains, you might be shocked to discover, don’t usually turn to glass when they get heated up. Glassy biological tissue had never been observed in nature until the discovery of this young man’s brain. A hell of a thing to have as a legacy.
The researchers used a technique called differential scanning calorimetry to figure out the temperature at which this person’s brain had turned into glass. They found that the shards they had been working with had originally been exposed to temperatures above 950 degrees Fahrenheit (510 Celsius).
This was way higher than the maximum temperatures usually produced by pyroclastic flows, which are extremely hot and fast-moving mixtures of ash, gases, and rock fragments that flow down the side of a volcano. The temperatures of most usually topped out at around 869 degrees Fahrenheit (465 degrees Celsius).
The researchers think that an unbelievably hot cloud of ash engulfed this poor young man before rapidly dissipating, thus providing the superheating and rapid cooling needed to form glass. The volcanic debris then buried the man under ash.
As for why that intense heat didn’t just melt his brain, the researchers think the bones of his skull may have protected against direct contact with the ash, essentially turning his brainpan into a pizza oven.
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