From the courtesy of ArsTechnica
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the heat was so extreme in some places that it vaporized body fluids and exploded the skulls of several inhabitants unable to flee in time.
Now, archaeologists have determined that the heat also fused brain tissue into glass in one victim.
The discovery is described in a new short paper in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The eruption released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in particular.
Pliny the Younger wrote of “broad sheets of flame” and a rain of ash in a letter to the historian Tacitus (the letter is the sole surviving eyewitness account of the disaster).
The vast majority of the victims died of asphyxiation, choking to death on the thick clouds of noxious gas and ash.
But a 2001 study in Nature estimated a temperature of 300° Celsius (572° Fahrenheit) for the pyroclastic surge that destroyed Pompeii, sufficient to kill inhabitants in fractions of a second.
Back in 2018, we reported on the conclusion of University of Naples archaeologist Pierpaolo Petrone (one of the co-authors of the 2001 Nature paper) that inhabitants of Herculaneum may have suffered a similar fate.
Petrone and colleagues examined about 100 skeletons excavated from the boathouses along the shoreline at Herculaneum.
It’s likely that people unable to evacuate in time tried to take refuge there, only to be killed by the hot, dense pyroclastic flows.
They found red and black residue on some of the bones that could not have come from coins or other metal artifacts, since there weren’t any near this particular site.
Raman microspectroscopy revealed high concentrations of iron, indicative of human bodily fluids, although the researchers couldn’t say for certain that the source was human blood.
There was also fracturing in the bones—more evidence of exposure to sudden extreme high heat—as well as “cracking and explosion” of the skullcaps.
The latter is consistent with forensic cases where skulls burst from extreme heat, forming the same telltale circular pattern around the skull.
They concluded that the pyroclastic flows boiled the soft brain tissue and evaporated the bodily fluids of those victims—so much so that skulls literally exploded.
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