The volcanic eruption at Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD is almost certainly the most famous volcano of all time. It has captured the attention of everyone, including historians, volcanologists, and the average person interested in cataclysmic events.

One of the many reasons that this volcano is so famous is because of the massive destruction it left in its wake, but perhaps more important is what wasn’t destroyed. The remains of the people living in the area surrounding the volcano were left for archeologists to find centuries later. Many of them were preserved in the positions they were in at their death, including one couple famously embracing and seeming to accept their fate.

Perhaps the most mysterious of all the remains found is from a man known to be around 20 years old, whose brain was somehow melted into glass. His is the only known example of tissue being transformed into glass, not just with humans, but of any living creature. Needless to say, this grabs the attention of scientists in many different fields.

The mystery first came to light when it was discovered that a Herculaneum man’s skull contained a hunk of glass. This finding happened in 2020, and since then, it has been studied by many experts with a variety of possible explanations being put forward. The problem that researchers need to overcome is that the temperatures in the area were over 900 degrees Fahrenheit in many areas, and at those temperatures, the brain should have melted into a liquid and drained away, not solidified into glass.

In fact, given that there are no other examples of organic tissue being turned into glass like this, there is no known temperature at which this could be expected to happen.

A new proposal has been published by a team of researchers at Roma Tre University, however, that may explain what happened. The researchers suggest that the man, who was located in his bed at the time, may have been flash-fried by super hot ash. The high temperatures (which, thankfully, would have killed him instantly so he wouldn’t have suffered) rapidly heated his brain, bringing it to a temperature where organic matter can form glass.

Due to the position in which he was sleeping at the time of his death, the material would not leak out of his skull, but instead remain in place. After the ash passed by, the air returned to an ambient temperature, allowing the brain matter to rapidly cool by hundreds of degrees. As it hardened into glass, many pieces broke apart, but some remained intact to be found by archeologists thousands of years later.

So, to put it simply, this was only made possible by a series of events, each extraordinarily unlikely on their own, to happen in just the right way to turn this man’s brain into glass. It also explains why this has never been observed to happen before.

The paper will undoubtedly be scrutinized by scientists, but at this point, it seems to be the most likely explanation.

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