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Asked by Michaela & Machaela to Áine, Victoria, Lydia, Eoin, Ciarán on 14 Nov 2014.
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Lydia Bach answered on 14 Nov 2014:
Hello!
Well depends how the body would be disposed of! 😉
If it was buried in earth it would take maybe 10 years or so to decompose to a skeleton. In a coffin this would take much longer because there are no microorganisms there that can help with decomposition. That’s why it can take up to 50 years in a coffin.
In water, if its freezing a body may not even decompose much at all. A body in the might decompose faster because of the marine animals that nibble it to shreds in no time.
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Ciarán O'Brien answered on 14 Nov 2014:
A lot of a body will fall apart over a few years, but to REALLY decompose a corpse, you need microbes. Bacteria and fungi do the vast majority of breaking down a dead body, to them a corpse is just a giant bag of food with a sticker slapped across it saying “EAT ME”.
The soft gooey parts are easiest to break down for food, so they go first as fungi sink microscopic root-like filaments into them, turning fibres and tough materials into mush, and bacteria feed on the bits the fungi don’t get at. Worms and bigger creatures can burrow into the body, decomposing great big chunks of it. Flesh breaks down fast, but there’s a lot of it, and oxygen is a limiting factor (breaking down a corpse releases other gases that might leave less oxygen around the body, and the larger organisms need oxygen so they’ll avoid the corpse if they can’t breathe in it, leaving bacteria to go through it more slowly (they work fastest in oxygen, but there are some that can work without it).
All told it does take about a decade as Lydia said, if you don’t disturb the soil. You could speed it up by pumping oxygen into the soil so more and bigger organisms can decompose the body, or raising the temperature a bit so organisms can work faster. But that would be a very rude thing to do to someone’s grave, best leave them to decompose naturally 🙂
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