Soon after Vesuvius erupted, around 140 citizens sought shelter in a dozen...houseboats, on the town’s beach.
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..."thermally induced fulminant shock" isn’t very descriptive, even if it does sound dreadful. But that’s where the new study, published recently in PLoS One, has new things to offer. The superheated surge clouds vaporized the flesh and bodily fluids of victims in an instant, the researchers say, producing a gruesome effect in the skull, causing it to crack and explode.
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Physical examination of the remains offered further proof. Here’s how the authors grimly describe it in their study:
"In the present work, careful inspection of the victims’ skeletons revealed cracking and explosion of the skullcap and blackening of the outer and inner [layers of the cranial bone], associated with black exudations [i.e. when liquid pours out] from the skull openings and the fractured bone. Such effects appear to be the combined result of direct exposure to heat and an increase in intracranial steam pressure induced by brain ebullition [boiling], with skull explosion as the possible outcome."
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This all sounds unbelievably awful, but these victims died instantly, if that’s any consolation....[That is TREMENDOUS consolation.]People who were killed by the [earlier] ash-filled pyroclastic flows were exposed to temperatures around 200 to 250 degrees C (400 to 480 degrees F); as their bodies burned, their muscles contracted, resulting in a final “pugilistic” body posture in which their toes and fingers were curled inwards. The victims in the boat-chambers, on the other hand, had “life like” death poses, suggesting an instant death. The lack of a “complete pugilistic pose in the victims’ corpses at Herculaneum [The beach where the houseboats were.] may indicate that the muscles disappeared more quickly than they contracted,” the researchers write.
https://gizmodo.com/intense-heat-from-ancient-vesuvius-eruption-caused-vict-1829634156
...
..."thermally induced fulminant shock" isn’t very descriptive, even if it does sound dreadful. But that’s where the new study, published recently in PLoS One, has new things to offer. The superheated surge clouds vaporized the flesh and bodily fluids of victims in an instant, the researchers say, producing a gruesome effect in the skull, causing it to crack and explode.
...
Physical examination of the remains offered further proof. Here’s how the authors grimly describe it in their study:
"In the present work, careful inspection of the victims’ skeletons revealed cracking and explosion of the skullcap and blackening of the outer and inner [layers of the cranial bone], associated with black exudations [i.e. when liquid pours out] from the skull openings and the fractured bone. Such effects appear to be the combined result of direct exposure to heat and an increase in intracranial steam pressure induced by brain ebullition [boiling], with skull explosion as the possible outcome."
Ain't gotta be no archeologist thing to see that! That skull done exploded. Case closed.
...
This all sounds unbelievably awful, but these victims died instantly, if that’s any consolation....[That is TREMENDOUS consolation.]People who were killed by the [earlier] ash-filled pyroclastic flows were exposed to temperatures around 200 to 250 degrees C (400 to 480 degrees F); as their bodies burned, their muscles contracted, resulting in a final “pugilistic” body posture in which their toes and fingers were curled inwards. The victims in the boat-chambers, on the other hand, had “life like” death poses, suggesting an instant death. The lack of a “complete pugilistic pose in the victims’ corpses at Herculaneum [The beach where the houseboats were.] may indicate that the muscles disappeared more quickly than they contracted,” the researchers write.
https://gizmodo.com/intense-heat-from-ancient-vesuvius-eruption-caused-vict-1829634156
