Condition of bodies after the descent

[Robert T. Paige]

To Matthew Newman:
(Bob Godfrey) quote >>Soft tissues are made up mainly of water which is compressible only to a very limited degree, and bone would not be affected..<<

I have heard that the human body is composed of a large percentage of water.

 

[monica e. hall]

The human body, I think, is about 70% water. However, that makes no difference to the fact that, as Bob said, water is compressible only to a very small degree.

Have a go at this.
http://data.piercecollege.edu/weather/water.html

 

[Aly Jones]

Body is full of water,does not matter. If you're dead you are going to decompose. The question is,Will the watery grave make the body decompose faster? I think so.

 

[Inger Sheil]

I don't think the question is decomposition, Alyson - the question is the affect that pressure would have on the bodies in the immediate aftermath of the sinking, which is where the water content of the body and questions of compressiblity comes in.

The cold of the water at that depth would certainly slow the progress of decay (in some freshwater lakes, it even leads to a process call "saponification", turning the body into a so-called "soap mummy" that might last nearly intact for years...I don't know of any marine examples of this occuring, though). In shallower depths, the gasses caused by decomposition usually cause a body to rise after a period. It is notoriously difficult to keep a body weighted down - many attempts to conceal a murder victim by tying them to a heavy object and dropping them in a body of water fail when decomposition gasses cause the body to rise.

I don't know - and would be curious to find out - if such gas is also a byproduct of the marine bacteria causing decomposition at that depth. And if such gas is produced, would water pressure cause it to be immediately expelled from the corpse, prohibiting the bloating we associate decomposition with on land and in shallower depths?

 

[Inger Sheil]

Aha! A specific answer to decomposition at great depth, and confirmation that saponification can occur in marine waters:

http://www.hbo.com/autopsy/baden/qa_10.html

Looks like sealife is the main reason for the destruction of soft tissue, then chemical processes act on the bones.

 

[Aly Jones]

Hi Inger. Sea life are made to live in the sea, while humans are made to live on land!

 

[Jeremy Aufderheide]

Interesting that he says that the dissolving of bone would most likely have taken decades. That goes against what I've read on this forum that it probably only took a couple of years.

 

[Inger Sheil]

I wonder how much research went into the answer, Jeremy? I imagine it would depend on variable factors such as how much calcium is in seawater at that depth. Might be difficult to nail it down without either lab experiments replicating those deep sea conditions or by observing comparable wrecks, and I doubt many of the latter are monitored to watch the decay of human remains.

 

[Steve Gad]

After a relatively short period of immersion, the skin on hands and feet can come off like gloves or socks. Submersion under water, even for a relatively short period of time, decomposes the body quickly and leads to tissue breakdown that makes it harder to determine a time of death

 

[LDDavis911]

The body would not be flattened, any more than those of the fish which live down there. Soft tissues are made up mainly of water which is compressible only to a very limited degree, and bone would not be affected. Only those areas which contain air spaces that could not fill with water as the body descended would show much sign of pressure damage - notably the chest cavity. Bodies have been recovered from great depths and apart from the obvious rupturing of the lungs, ears, etc they are basically intact. We've all seen those drinking cups brought back from the depths and compressed by pressure, but that happens because they are made of a plastic foam material which contains mainly air.

Thank you Bob. I've wondered that for 40 years! That makes perfect sense.

 

[HelenaRibeiro]

I'm going to be honest, when someone commented on YouTube that when Titanic sank that there was a "rain of bodies" from which the only remain clues nowadays were the shoes in the debris field, I truly believed and did comment that it was far more likely for any bodies inside her to either be flushed out due to the currents or that they would have imploded way before she reached the sea bed, and that the shoes and clothes photographed on the sea bed mostly came from luggage and other personal belongings.

Now however, I'm left in doubt.

I had previously seen some liars in videos stating that in James Cameron's footages of the inside of Titanic, some corpse's and skeletons could be seen (some ghosts, even!), so I truly thought that the commenter was one of those people, mostly due to him saying that he had read so in an official secret report of some kind. Now, however, I wonder if there was any truth to what they said (excluding official secret report) and that they had merely embellished the source.

Perhaps my assumption was indeed wrong and I was too harsh with the man, while spreading some misinformation as well...
I actually do feel quite bad now.