The grave, gross facts about how your body decomposes
Nature isn't kind to the human body after death. Thankfully, the
days of natural decomposition have been replaced by decidedly modern
rituals of death. We can choose to delay the decomposition process by
being embalmed, where our bodily fluids are replaced with preservatives.
Or we can be cremated, where we are cooked at temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours while we turn to ash.
While our modern disposal rituals might not sound appealing, the
process of nature composting us back into the Earth is even less so.
Even earliest man knew how to put some distance between himself and his
decomposing dead. In 2003, archeologists found evidence of ancient humans who had buried their dead in northern Spain about 350,000 years ago.
So what happens during decomposition? Here are five weird ways our bodies deconstruct after death.
Your cells burst open. The process in which the human body decomposes starts just minutes after death. When the heart stops beating, we experience algor mortis,
or the “death chill,” when the temperature of the body falls about 1.5
degrees Fahrenheit an hour until it reaches room temperature. Almost
immediately, the blood becomes more acidic as carbon dioxide builds up.
This causes cells to split open, emptying enzymes into the tissues, which start to digest themselves from within.
You turn white — and purple. Gravity makes its
mark on the human body in the first moments after death. While the rest
of your body turns deathly pale, heavy red blood cells move to the parts
of your body that are closest to the ground. This is because
circulation has stopped. The results are purple splotches over your
lower parts known as livor mortis. In fact, it is by studying the
markings of livor mortis that the coroner can tell exactly what time you
died.
Calcium makes your muscles contract. We've all
heard of rigor mortis, in which a dead body becomes stiff and hard to
move. Rigor mortis generally sets in about three to four hours after
death, peaks at 12 hours, and dissipates after 48 hours. Why does it
happen? There are pumps
in the membranes of our muscle cells that regulate calcium. When the
pumps stop working in death, calcium floods the cells, causing the
muscles to contract and stiffen. Thus, there is rigor mortis.
Your organs will digest themselves. Putrefaction,
or when our bodies start to look like extras in a zombie movie, follows
rigor mortis. This phase is delayed by the embalming process, but
eventually the body will succumb. Enzymes in the pancreas make
the organ begin to digest itself. Microbes will tag-team these enzymes,
turning the body green from the belly onwards. As Caroline Williams writes
in NewScientist, “the main beneficiaries are among the 100 trillion
bacteria that have spent their lives living in harmony with us in our
guts.” As this bacterium breaks us down, it releases putrescine and
cadaverine, which are the compounds which make the human body smell in
death.
You may be covered in a wax. After putrefaction,
decay moves quickly to turn the body into a skeleton. However, some
bodies take an interesting turn on the way. If a body comes into contact
with cold soil or water, it may develop adipocere, a fatty, waxy
material formed from the bacteria breaking down tissue. Adipocere works
as a natural preservative on the inner organs. It can mislead
investigators into thinking a body died much sooner than it actually
did, as was the case of a 300-year-old adipocere corpse recently found in Switzerland.
In the end, we all return to the Earth: it’s just a matter of how.
But whether it’s by composting or the fires of cremation, we all turn to
dust and ash — and in some cases, wax.
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