Scientists found intact neurons preserved as obsidian in the corpse of a victim of the Pompeii eruption, somehow the intense heat preserved the brain. How did this happen?
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The process we’re talking about is called “vitrification”, which is when a liquid is cooled into a solid very quickly so that crystals don’t form. The end product of doing that is “glass”.
Obsidian is rock that melted and then cooled quickly. The hard sheen on pottery is also that. When plants/trees need to survive extreme cold weather, some of their tissues survive by vitrifying naturally instead of freezing. A fun example is cotton candy. If you melt sugar and cool it slowly, you get hard candy, but if you cool it quickly by spinning it into little strands, you get a bundle of glassy candy threads. In medicine, vitrification is also used to preserve tissues like a woman’s eggs–the tissue is supercooled so quickly that it doesn’t just freeze, it vitrifies into a glass.
So this poor man’s brain vitrified because it was melted (along with his other organs) into a liquid by the intense heat of the pyroclastic flow (deadly volcano gases) and then also cooled back to room temperature quickly.
This is extremely unusual because a soft tissue like the brain wouldn’t normally vitrify. This is the first known example of a brain being vitrified by heat, even from elsewhere in the Pompeii site. This required unusual circumstances which are not fully understood yet.
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