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National Geographic
07-03-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
Why it's unlikely Mount Vesuvius really turned a brain to glass
In the ruins of Herculaneum, an Ancient Roman city on the west coast of Italy that was buried by Mount Vesuvius's catastrophic eruption in 79 A.D., researchers made a startling discovery: a human brain transformed into glass. It was the first documented case of a brain naturally preserved in such a shocking state. The remains were found inside the skull of a seemingly male victim lying in a charred bed within the Collegium Augustalium, preserved in what the researchers describe as an "obsidian-like" material with a black, shiny appearance. But exactly how the eruption would have caused such an unprecedented transformation remained a mystery when the ancient victim was found. Now, the same scientists who discovered this glass, have published a study in Scientific Reports saying an extremely hot ash cloud swept through Herculaneum before an avalanche of ash and volcanic rock entombed the ancient city. That ash cloud, study authors speculated, made possible the conditions that could theoretically turn brain to glass through a process called vitrification. But is it too good to be true?
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Mount Vesuvius eruption turned a victim's brain into glass
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE presented its surrounding ancient Roman communities with a number of terrifying ways to die: falling debris, collapsing buildings, asphyxiation from superheated dust plumes, etc.. And while attention is often focused on the destruction of Pompeii and its thousands of victims, the fate of nearby Herculaneum wasn't much better. According to recent analysis of unique samples recovered from the seaside archeological site, the Vesuvius eruption even caused one person's brain to flash-fry into a rare form of organic glass. The theory, laid out in a study published February 27 in the journal Scientific Reports, is based on examinations of tiny shards found in 2020 inside the skull and spinal column of an individual at Herculaneum–a small port town with a population of around 5,000 people at the time. The victim is believed to have been a roughly 20-year-old man who worked as a guard at the Collegium Augustalium, a public building dedicated to worshipping Emperor Augustus. At the time of his death, however, the guard was laying in his bed—and it was this environment that likely fostered the extremely specific conditions needed for brain and spinal fluid vitrification. While glass is a foundational component in many industries today, it only naturally occurs in rare circumstances. This is because glass is only created when its liquid state cools fast enough to prevent crystallization as it solidifies. In order to accomplish this, there must be a major temperature difference between the substance itself and its environment. Not only that, but the liquid material must also solidify at a much higher temperature than its surroundings. Because most organic matter is largely water, conditions rarely allow for natural glass formation given its freezing point.'It would therefore be impossible to find organic glass embedded in volcanic deposits that have reached several hundred of Celsius degrees,' wrote the study's authors. Using X-ray analysis and electron microscopy, the team confirmed the guard's brain could only have turned to glass if it was heated 'well above' 950 degrees Fahrenheit (510 degrees Celsius) before quickly cooling. But the majority of the eruption's known after-effects cannot account for brain and spinal fluid vitrification. The eruption's pyroclastic flows, for example, did not exceed 869℉ (465 ℃) and cooled far too slowly to create the glass. The study authors therefore concluded that 'the body was exposed to the passage and vanishing of a short-lived, dilute and much hotter pyroclastic flow' that offered an early, quick flash-heating before subsequent rapid cooling. 'The glass that formed as a result of such a unique process attained a perfect state of preservation of the brain and its microstructures,' they wrote, adding that it is now the 'only such occurrence' known on Earth. And according to Guido Giordano, the study's lead author at Italy's Università Roma Tre, it's unlikely they will find another example anytime soon. 'In principle it is possible. There is more to be excavated below the modern city that may have preserved a similar occurrence,' Giordano tells Popular Science. 'However conditions must have been very, very specific because the organic tissue must have experienced a heating fast enough not to entirely destroy it (which is instead the most common occurrence) and then fast-cool to turn into glass.'Giordano believes the building and room in which the guard died offered just the right conditions. But if additional brain glass is to be found, it will be in the ruins of Herculaneum and not Pompeii. 'Such [a] hot ash cloud hit Herculaneum during the night when Pompeii was still under the fallout of pumice,' he says. 'The early pyroclastic flows arrived and buried Pompeii the day after, but at lower temperatures.'
USA Today
27-02-2025
- Science
- USA Today
How the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius did something incredible to one man's brain
How the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius did something incredible to one man's brain Show Caption Hide Caption Erupting volcano struck by lightning as spectators watch in awe Spectators in Guatemala capture on camera the moment lightning struck Volcan del Fuego as it erupted. Archeologists have previously discovered human brains preserved in a variety of ways, including drying, freezing and tanning. Some preserved brains even resemble soap. But now they've found something new: a brain that turned into glass. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, archeologist and volcanologists show that the shards of black glass found in the skull of a young man who died when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD are in fact his vitrified brain. "This is totally counterintuitive," said Guido Giordano, a volcanologist at the Roma Tre University, a public research university in Rome. "Under normal conditions, you cannot vitrify any organic tissue unless you drop it to well below zero very quickly. But then when it returns to ambient temperature it reverts," he said. But after doing extensive testing on the black material, they were able to conclusively prove it was indeed vitrified tissue – the man's brain and parts of his spinal cord had turned into glass. How did this man's brain turn to glass? In 79 AD, Italy's Mount Vesuvius erupted, utterly destroying the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum over the course of two days. On the first day of the eruption, Pompeii was covered in ash and falling debris, but nearby Herculaneum got only a light dusting with ash. "The first few hours of the eruption of Vesuvius were scary enough to cause most of the people in Herculaneum to flee and search for rescue by the city harbor", said Giordano. "But during the night the first pyroclastic flow was ejected from the volcano, a turbulent mix of ash, pumice and super hot gasses, and hit Herculaneum." Most of the people were at the seashore when the first pyroclastic flow arrived, because they were likely waiting for rescue. They died when the roiling cloud of hot ash hit. But inside the Collegium Augustalium, a young man of about 20 years was lying in his wooden bed. The Collegium, located on the city's main street, was a public building dedicated to the worship of Emperor Augustus. What happened next, as conjectured by the scientists, is as dreadful as it is fascinating. The ash cloud burst out of Mount Vesuvius was, at its core hot, heavy and deadly. "It's like a landslide. That material is able to knock down houses," said Giordano. But at the cloud's edges, things are different. It was a deadly haze of superheated grey ash that billowed through the nearly empty town, reaching temperatures of between 1,000 and 1,100 degrees. It was similar to the ash cloud from the 2018 eruption of Volcán de Fuego in Guatemala, which killed at least hundreds of people. "In Herculaneum, this ash cloud engulfed the city, hot enough to kill people and raise the temperature of their bodies to above 500 or 600 degrees Celsius (between 930 and 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit,)" Giordano said. The young man would have died instantly. But what happened to his brain was remarkable – the only such case ever encountered by archeologists. Almost as soon as it swept through the town, the cloud dissipated. Modern examples of such clouds can disappear within minute. In Herculaneum, it left only a thin layer of ash on the body and in the room, less than one inch. The temperatures inside of the ash cloud would have been expected to burn up the body and destroy all soft tissues. But it came and went so rapidly that there wasn't time. Instead, scientists believe, the body very quickly cooled back down to the ambient evening air temperature. "It needed to have first a rise in temperature well above 510° Celsius (950 degrees Fahrenheit), an event that is very fast and then very fast cooling," he said. This caused his brain to turn into glass during the cooling, locking in its structure. "Inside the skull there were all these black, shiny fragments," Giordano said. "They look like chips of obsidian, black, shiny and spiky." Some time later, the next wave of pyroclastic flow reached Herculaneum and the entire town was entombed in as much as 60 feet of ash and debris from the volcano. While the young man's body was initially excavated several years ago, archeologists weren't sure exactly what was in the skull. By testing fragments of what was found, they were able to prove that it was indeed brain tissue and that it was indeed glass. How are brains typically found in archeological digs? Given how delicate they are, preserved brains are not as uncommon as might be expected in the archeological record. A study published in March of last year by scientists at Oxford university found 4,405 examples of human brains being preserved, some of which were more than 12,000 years old. They included brains from Egyptian and Korean royalty, British and Scandinavian monks, Arctic explorers and a large number of bodies from the Middle Ages that were removed from the largest cemetery in Paris before the French Revolution. Those scientists found five types of brain preservation: Dehydration (often in desert climates) Freezing (Arctic explorers and some freeze-dried mummies, especially in the Andes.) Tanning (bodies preserved in acidic, tannin-filled bogs) Saponification (sometimes called "grave wax" this is when the fats in the brain turn to a soap-like clump) An unknown process, often found as some brain soft tissue preserved among otherwise skeletonized remains, commonly in the presence of clay and iron. The identification of the young Herculaneum man's brain as having turned to glass adds a new – and vanishingly rare – possibility to the list. As far as the researchers know, "it's the only time this has occurred," said Giordano,
Telegraph
27-02-2025
- Science
- Telegraph
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.'
