
Vesuvius eruption turned victim's brain to glass
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ancient Rome was so hot that it turned a victim's brain into glass in a process never before seen on Earth, scientists have proved.
A shard of 'obsidian-like' glass was found inside the skull of one victim of the disaster in 79AD which is thought to have killed up to 16,000 people.
Fresh analysis of this shard revealed that it had to have been made through a process of vitrification – rapid heating and cooling – and must have at some point reached more than 500C (932F) before plunging to below zero.
It was previously thought that this shard of glassy brain, which was found in 2020, was caused because the man was buried under an avalanche of hot gas and rock, called the pyroclastic flow, which buried the cities in a layer of debris.
However, these can only reach 465C and therefore would not have been adequate to create the piece of glass.
Scientists from Università Roma Tre in Italy think they have solved this conundrum and believe Vesuvius created a superheated cloud which hit the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, which is east of the volcano on the coast, before the pyroclastic flow.
This rapid cloud was in excess of the 510C necessary to instantly turn the normal brain into a liquid, therefore allowing for a more rapid cooling, they believe.
The extreme heat and cold in such quick succession turned the liquid brain into the glass found inside the skull and spinal cord of the sleeping man, who was about 20 years old, scientists write in their study.
Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by the eruption and the victim with the vitrified brain is thought to have been in his bed in the Collegium Augustalium, a building that was dedicated to the cult of the Emperor Augustus, on the main street of Herculaneum.
The researchers used X-ray and electron microscope analysis to study the properties of the glass and find out what conditions would be needed to create it.
They found the conditions needed to turn the organic material into a liquid and then back into a solid in a short enough time period to create the glass are extremely unusual.
More than 2,000 bodies have been found as part of the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, but only this one individual has the glass brain.
'The apparently vitrified remains of brain and spinal cord found in the Collegium Augustalium, is the only occurrence of this type,' the scientists write in the study.
'This uniqueness requires very specific and rare conditions for glass formation and preservation.
'The brain tissue studied here is the only known case of preserved vitrification of human tissue as a result of cooling after heating to very high temperatures.
'This is the only way by which such a glass type can be preserved in the geological or archaeological record and explains why this is a unique occurrence and preserves the ultra-fine neural structure of the brain.'
Prof Guido Giordano, who led the research, said: 'We hypothesise that in 79AD the following scenario occurred: after the first hours of the eruption that produced the eruptive column observed and described by Pliny the Younger on the night of Aug 24, the first pyroclastic flows began.
'The first of these reached the city with a diluted but very hot ash cloud, well over 510°C.
'It left only a few centimetres of very fine ash on the ground, but the thermal impact was terrible and fatal, although brief enough to leave - at least in the only case of the discovery in the Collegium Augustalium – remains of brain still intact.
'The cloud must have then dissipated just as quickly, allowing these remains to cool so rapidly as to trigger the vitrification process.
'Only later in the night was the city completely buried by the deposits of the pyroclastic flows.'

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

Leader Live
6 days ago
- Leader Live
Roman artefacts found along Hynet project pipeline route
An archaeological investigation plan has been submitted to Flintshire County Council before work on the new pipeline takes place. The project involves the construction of a 26km underground pipeline from Elton, Cheshire to the Point of Ayr gas terminal in Talacre - work on which is expected to start this summer. At the Point of Ayr gas terminal, it will then transport carbon dioxide to a platform in the Douglas oil and gas field in the Irish Sea where it will be pumped into depleted oil and gas reservoirs rather than released into the atmosphere. The pipeline will capture 109 million tonnes of carbon over 25 years during phase one of operation - equivalent to taking 60.1 million cars off the road for a year. (Image: Hynet project) A Written Scheme of Investigation (WSI) has been submitted to Flintshire Council - setting out how archaeological investigation will take place along the route ahead of construction. A total of 79 targeted trial trenches were located to test - of which 45 have already been completed as part of an earlier phase. Oxford Archaeology were commissioned to undertake the trial-trench evaluation on the 26km route of new pipeline. Eight of the trenches in Cheshire West revealed a total of 13 archaeological features, alongside a small group of artefacts from just three trenches. A trench to the south of Saughall, near Chester, produced the most significant archaeological features identified by the evaluation; comprised a cobble and sandstone surface (perhaps a footing for a building)and a step-profiled ditch. Both were associated with Roman pottery, ironwork, and glass dating to the mid-second to mid-third century AD. MORE NEWS: Of the 22 trenches in Flintshire, 14 revealed archaeological features - the earliest datable feature comprised a single pit found on gently sloping ground at Pentre Halkyn, which contained Bronze Age pottery. The report states that the results of further investigation work to take place will "inform development of an appropriate mitigation strategy for any significant archaeological remains". If the evaluation reveals little of archaeological significance, then no further work may be necessary. Liverpool Bay CCS seeks approval from Flintshire Council to approve the Written Scheme of Archaeology - which is needed for work to commence.


Economist
28-05-2025
- Economist
The decoding of ancient Roman scrolls is speeding up
IF YOU WANTED to read an ancient Roman scroll, you might reach for a dictionary, and perhaps a magnifying glass. You would probably not think of using a particle accelerator. But that is what is required to unravel the papyrus scrolls found in Herculaneum, a Roman town buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. Even then, success is far from guaranteed: since 2023, researchers attempting to unravel the scrolls have been stuck on the first few. Now, armed with more data and a more powerful particle accelerator, they expect to make more rapid headway.

The National
27-05-2025
- The National
How the grandeur of Scotland's capital began with a rock
In this penultimate column of the city series, I will once again show how, like all our cities, Edinburgh developed from a small settlement to grandeur through the trinity of a fortification, religious institutions and royal patronage. Regular readers will know that as a history writer, I very much depend on the work of national and local historians. There have been too many to mention for Edinburgh, but its history has the same problem that I have found in my researches on most of Scotland, namely that ancient records were stolen and destroyed by English invaders. Although it actually only became the capital after numerous other places, such as Stirling and Dunfermline, had their time as the seat of government, Edinburgh has been at the centre of Scotland's history for many centuries. READ MORE: Did Robert the Bruce destroy this Scottish city's castle? It owes that prominence largely to luck. Some 340 million years ago in the midst of the Carboniferous period, Edinburgh was home to massive seismic activity. Arthur's Seat was a volcano that formed the landscape and also left a volcanic plug – Castle Rock. Enlightenment scientist James Hutton (1726-1797), known as the 'father of geology', first proved that Salisbury Crags and the surrounding area were volcanic in origin. Castle Rock mostly stands some 260ft (80m) above the city centre, with its summit of about 430ft (130m) high. Erosion, especially during the last Ice Age, left the cliffs to the north, south and west of the rock standing sheer while the 'crag and tail' from what is now the esplanade runs eastward down the Royal Mile. It is an unusual formation which has few similar examples elsewhere. According to archaeological finds, the first human inhabitants came to the Edinburgh area around 8500 BCE and like elsewhere in Scotland they were probably hunter-gatherers who immigrated over many decades from the continent via what is now England. Archaeological excavations have proven that Castle Rock was used as a fortification as far back as 900 BCE. It has been in human use ever since, which makes it the longest continuously inhabited place in Britain. It cannot be said with certainty but we can speculate that the Edinburgh area was first settled permanently during the Iron Age as a centre for a tribe who became known as the Votadini. Their capital was at the Traprain Law hill fort in East Lothian and their domination of the south-east of Scotland was recorded by the Roman writer Ptolemy who was writing in Greek and therefore knew them as the Otadini. This tribe, which spoke an ancient Brythonic-Celtic tongue, was very much in control of the whole Edinburgh area when the Romans arrived in the first and second centuries CE. They built a fort at Cramond at the confluence of the River Almond and the Firth of Forth to the north-west of the city. This fort was linked to the Roman settlements as far south as the River Tyne by a road known as Dere Street, which was constructed in 79-81 CE on the orders of Gnaius Julius Agricola, the governor of the Roman province of Britannia. Amazingly it was less than 30 years ago that proof emerged of the importance of Cramond to the Romans. In 1996, ferryman Robert Graham spotted a large sculpture lying in the mud and the following year archaeologists from the City of Edinburgh Council and the National Museums of Scotland excavated what became known as the Cramond Lioness. The well-preserved sculpture was made of white sandstone that had been imported to Cramond. The best theory is that it was a grave marker for a Roman officer, although how it became lodged in the mud beside the Cramond Ferry steps is not known. ACCORDING to Historic Environment Scotland's website: 'The lioness, carved from a single block of sandstone, is 1.5m long, and depicts a crouching lioness with her paws on a naked man's shoulders and his head in her mouth. 'On the plinth, two snakes emerge from below the lioness's belly. Pieces with a similar subject matter, of carnivores devouring prey, are common throughout the Roman Empire, and are interpreted as symbolising the destructive power of death.' As shown by a plethora of archaeological finds, the Votadini seem to have co-existed with the Romans for 300 years and more, but when the Roman Empire abandoned Britain around 410 CE, the Votadini gradually moved their headquarters from Traprain Law to the Castle Rock from where the Gododdin people, descendants of the Votadini, ruled over the eastern part of what is now the Lothians. Where did the name of the city come from? Edwin was a seventh-century king of the lost ancient kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira which joined together to form Northumbria that stretched from the Firth of Forth as far south as York. As I have written before, Edwin was recognised by the Venerable Bede and other chroniclers as the most powerful king on the island of Great Britain. Some historians say he came north to the Forth and established a fortress town, a burgh, which was named after him. Its Gaelic name, Dùn Èideann, 'the fort of Edwin', confirms that etymology. Recent scholars say the whole area was named Din Eidyn in the Brythonic tongue and predated Edwin but the main evidence for that derivation comes from the epic poem Y Goddodin and it most certainly is not factual. The earliest written reference to a fort on the rock is seen in that poem, which was written much later but places it as a residence in the late sixth century of Mynyddog the Magnificent, the Goddodin warrior who died fighting the Angles at the Battle of Catraeth, usually identified as Catterick, although we do not know the exact location or date of the battle. For hundreds of years, the history of Edinburgh was the history of its castle on the rock but as with the rest of Scotland we have no written records of what happened in Edinburgh in the Dark Ages. We know the settlement expanded slowly but surely beside the fortification of Edwin's burgh and managed to avoid most of the upheavals that accompanied the establishment of the new kingdom of Alba after King Kenneth mac Alpin united the Scoti of Dalriada and the Picts of Fortriu in the 840s. READ MORE: Bouncer-turned-filmmaker's Glasgow gangland drama becomes surprise smash TV hit A succession of kings of the Scoti and Picts had their capitals north of the Forth and as I always point out that the Kingdom of England did not originate until nearly a century later under Athelstan, termed in his own time as King of the English. Athelstan invaded Scotland in 934 and may have campaigned in the Lothians, but he went south empty-handed and in the final years of the first millennium the Scots campaigned militarily to push the English out of the Lothians and Scottish Borders, a victory that was finally achieved in the Battle of Carham in 1018 when King Malcolm II of Alba and King Owen (the Bald) of Strathclyde united to defeat the Northumbrian forces. The first castle on the rock was almost certainly a wooden motte-and-bailey construction, but it was not until royal patronage and religious institutions came to Edwin's Burgh that the conditions were met for expansion. During the reign of Malcolm III, Canmore, a royal residence was established on Castle Rock though he retained Dunfermline as his capital. His queen, Saint Margaret, was living in the residence when she was told of the death of her husband and their son, Edward, killed while fighting the English at the Battle of Alnwick on November 13, 1093. Margaret died of grief just three days after the battle. Their other son, Edgar, briefly ruled over Scotland and seems to have built some sort of castle on the Rock because he is recorded as dying there in 1107. His brother Alexander I succeeded him and may have developed the castle, though he preferred Stirling Castle as his court. It was the sixth and youngest of what Nigel Tranter called the 'Margaretsons' who really endowed Edinburgh. A great revolutionary monarch who devised the feudal system and transformed the governance of Scotland, David I gained the throne in 1124 and immediately and significantly developed Edinburgh Castle as a royal residence. The evidence for that assertion can be found inside the Castle to this day in the form of the austerely beautiful St Margaret's Chapel erected around 1130 by the king as a shrine to his saintly mother. It is the oldest and, in my opinion, the most beautiful building in Edinburgh. He formally made Edinburgh one of his first royal burghs in 1124 – personally, I thought the city could have made more of the 900th anniversary last year. Whether or not he did so as the result of a legendary encounter with a charging stag, David founded Holyrood Abbey in 1128 and the king moved frequently between the Castle and the royal lodgings at Holyrood, thus creating the Royal Mile alongside which Edinburgh grew steadily. That part of the modern Royal Mile we call Canongate was then a separate settlement and indeed became a burgh in its own right when King David issued his great charter of Holyrood Abbey in 1143, giving the Abbot secular control of the burgh. READ MORE: National park supporters urge ministers not to scrap Galloway proposal It must always be remembered that Leith, now very much part of Edinburgh, developed as a port even as Edinburgh was growing. According to The Story of Leith written by John Russell and published in 1922, there were actually two Leiths, North and South, and again it was King David who intervened in the port's history: 'Besides founding the Abbey of Holyrood, David I richly endowed it with lands and other gifts. In the Abbey's great charter of 1143 there is engrossed a long list of the many possessions bestowed upon it by its royal founder, and among these are the lands of North Leith and that part of South Leith which now extends from the present Coalhill to the Vaults. 'These lands, along with those of South Leith, then formed part of a wide area round the mouth of the river known as Inverleith, and are designated in the Abbey charter 'that part of lnverleith which is nearest the harbour.' These words would seem to show that even at this early date Leith had started on its career as a port. The shortened form of the name, Leith, early became specially applied to the town, while the longer form, Inverleith, like the name Inveresk at Musselburgh, was restricted to the lands farther up the river.' King David is known to have held Parliaments in the Castle in the latter years of his reign, and with his residence in the city, Edinburgh had its first spell as 'capital' of Scotland. David's successor but one, King William I, the Lion or Lyon, officially lived in the Castle but spent a lot of time in Haddington – a mistress, perhaps? After his defeat at the 1174 Battle of Alnwick, King William was captured and imprisoned by Henry II of England who imposed the humiliating Treaty of Falaise on William that included transferring Edinburgh Castle to English control. Henry also nominated the Scottish king's wife, Ermengarde de Beaumont, and the Castle was her dowry. Find out next week about Edinburgh's role in the Wars of Independence.