What happens to a buried body after 10, 50 & 100 years?

What happens to a buried body after 10, 50 & 100 years?

quora.com

Mark Werner

35w ago

Depends entirely on the conditions under which the body is buried, and the environmental conditions of where it’s buried.

If a person is buried in a modern, high-quality casket, complete with the additional concrete “grave vault”, and the body has been treated with standard embalming techniques, it can remain pretty much intact for a very long time. Many become rather “mummified” with the moisture content gradually evaporating.

A body simply placed in a hole in the ground will very rapidly decompose and depending on the moisture/acidity in the soil even the skeletal remains may began to decompose in fairly short order. Activity by bacteria, worms, grubs, etc. will rapidly remove most all flesh.

Dan Spiesz

works at Software Sales

35w ago

Have you ever heard of a body farm?

How about the Morthouse?

Well, a body farm is a huge, outdoor, fenced in area that contains a bunch of dead bodies that are used for studying the effects that decaying has on a body.

Pretty crazy, righ? And…

The Morthouse is a documentary on Netflix from 2003 about this body farm in Tennessee. It takes you on a very detailed exploration of this body farm and all of the different tests that they do on the body's. You for sure can't be squeamish if you are interested in watching this, but I thought it was pretty cool.

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William Bass is part of the documentary and also invented/ had the idea for body farms in 1972, after he had realized how little was known about the topic. Before this people use to get all of their information on human decay from experiments with pigs. A lot of this information we have now from these body farms is really useful in law enforcement and other areas of medicine.

I know that doesn't answer you question exactly, but honestly it really depends what the body is wrapped in.