Archaeologists and volcanologists have proven that the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius turned a young man's brain into glass.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE presented its surrounding ancient Roman communities with a number of terrifying ways ...

Transforming the brain tissue to glass would have required an extremely hot and fast-moving ash cloud, lab experiments suggest.

Along with volcanic ash, his brain and spinal cord were found to contain a mysterious archeological treasure: tiny, gleaming shards of black glass. Not till 2020, around 1,941 years after he ...

Researchers found organic glass in the skull of a volcano victim, indicating the extreme and unique environment triggered by Vesuvius's eruption in 79 CE.

The young man’s skull and spine likely protected the brain from “complete thermal breakdown,” allowing fragments of the unique organic glass to form. Unlike pyroclastic flows, which hug the ...

The paper, published in 2020, speculated that the heat of the explosion was so immense that it had fused the victim’s brain tissue into glass. Forensic analysis of the obsidian-like chips ...

But this particular victim's brain matter had been vitrified, i.e., fused into glass. Petrone et al. estimated that temperatures could have been as high as 520° Celsius (984° Fahrenheit ...

A cloud of super-heated volcanic ash and gas exploded the brain of one Herculaneum resident and the fragments inside his skull became an extremely rare organic glass ...