The eruption of Mount Vesuvius 2,000 years ago turned a victim’s brain tissue into glass. Scientists say they have figured out how this unusual phenomenon occurred.

Nearly 2,000 years after a young man died in the Vesuvius volcanic eruption, scientists have discovered that his brain was preserved when it turned to glass in an extremely hot cloud of ash. Researchers found the glass in 2020 and speculated that it was a fossilised brain but did not know how it had formed.

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