Volcano eruption turns man’s brain to glass with explosive heatwave
The brain of a victim caught up in the massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 1,000 years ago turned to glass in the 550C heat.
Towns including Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as smaller villages, were buried in the eruption in 79 AD under huge mounds of ash. Figures were frozen in time in the position they were cowering in as the hot ash enveloped them and more than 1,000 people are thought to have died following the eruption.
Centuries later, the unearthed towns – preserved by the very accident that wiped them off the ancient Roman maps – gave historians a fascinating glimpse into life of the past. Since then, research teams have investigated the sad area to find out more about what happened.
Incredibly, temperatures at the time reached such limits the brain of one person turned to glass in the horror incident. A report into the eruption, hypothesis of sudden body fluid vaporization in the 79 AD victims of Vesuvius, reads: “Here we describe key evidence of body exposure to extreme heat provided by recurrent skull explosion as detected by clear-cut fractures (Fig 2A), whose margins are sharp like those seen in cremated bones.
“In several cases, fracture lines radiate from a common centre, thus showing a “stellate” appearance. A single skull may also be affected by multiple fracture centres.
“[Temperatures of] 550C in short lived diluted PDC event leaving only a thin ash layer on the ground, and later followed by the deposition of lower temperature but thicker pyroclastic deposits, allows to understand the conditions for the formation and preservation of a vitrified brain recently discovered within a victim’s skull in the Collegium Augustalium.
“The transformation into glass of fresh cerebral tissue in a hot environment is only possible if two conditions are met – the heating event is short-lived and the body is not fully entombed in a hot deposit, a necessary condition to allow the very rapid cooling required to attain vitrification.”
Vitrification is the name given to a process where a substance is superheated and then cools very quickly, turning into glass as a result. In the case of the unfortunate resident of Herculaneum, this would have been brought about by a pyroclastic density current from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The presence of bones also gives an indication of temperature, as bones disintegrate at around 1000C, so temperatures this high could not have been reached.
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