Ученые раскрыли тайну превращения мозга древнего римлянина в стекло

Hot Ash Cloud and Quick Cooling Turned Brain to Glass The man whose brain turned to glass died in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman city that was closer to Mt. Vesuvius than Pompeii, and therefore experienced the volcano’s destruction first. He died while lying in a bed at the Collegium Augustalium, a building dedicated to Emperor Augustus. The man was around 20 years old, and may have been a guardian at the Collegium. Modern archaeologists discovered his remains in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 2018 that archeologist Pierpaolo Petrone spied the glass in the young man’s skull. In 2020, he and his colleagues published a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine and an article in PLOS One about their preliminary research. They found that the glass in the skeleton contained elements found in the human brain and spinal cord. It appeared that parts of this man’s brain and spinal cord had turned to glass—but how? In February 2025, they published a new research paper in Scientific Reports outlining a theory for how this could’ve happened. They argue that the brain must have experienced extremely hot temperatures followed by a very quick cooling period. They suggest this started when a fast, hot ash cloud from the volcano hit the area where the man was sleeping. The extreme heat of the ash cloud, which the researchers estimate was greater than 510 degrees Celsius (950 degrees Fahrenheit), would have killed him. After this brief, extreme exposure to heat, the return to normal temperatures caused his brain to cool down quickly. The volcano’s pyroclastic flow that hit him after this was also hot, but at less than 465 degrees Celsius, it was still cooler than the initial ash cloud. “Our study demonstrates quantitatively…that the glass transition occurred at 510°C during a fast cooling process,” says Guido Giordano, one of the co-authors of the paper, in an email to HISTORY. “[T]here is no doubt at all that we have discovered a truly vitrified human brain.”