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What Happens When You Die: Four Stages of Human Decomposition

What Happens When You Die: Four Stages of Decomposition

Have you ever wondered what happens the moment you die? Not where you go in the afterlife or how your body will be handled, but have you ever wondered what happens internally? Around four minutes after your heart fails to pump oxygen to the rest of your body, it begins to self destruct. This method of self destruction is universal in its stages and in its purpose; it has no bias of character or of monetary status. Without this process of death and decay, life would cease to exist.

Stage One: Autolysis (Self-Ingestion)

Autolysis begins the moment your circulatory system and respiratory system cease to pump blood to your muscles. Without oxygen being pumped into your cells, excess carbon dioxide begins to cause cell membranes to become acidic. Once these cells rupture, they release a digestive enzyme that begins to consume your cells from the inside out.

Rigor Mortis begins generally within an hour or two after death and lasts for around 24 hours. Rigor Mortis occurs when lactic acid buildup in the muscles causes them to stiffen at unnatural angles, a lot of times defying gravity. Small blisters filled with nutrient-rich fluid form on internal organs and under the surface of the skin. When these rupture, it causes the body to form a shiny or sweaty appearance. The body begins to cool at the time of death and slowly drops an average of 1.5 degrees an hour, pending on environmental factors. Within 24 hours, the body will be the same temperature as its surrounding environment.

What Happens When You Die: Four Stages Of Human Decomposition

Fact: In cases of violent or traumatic deaths, lactic acid is built up in such high amounts in the muscles that rigor mortis can occur at the exact moment of death. For example, if someone dies from drowning in a lake, they may still be clutching a chunk of grass from trying to grab onto the bank at the moment of their death.

Livor Mortis causes areas of the body exposed to external pressure such as gravity to turn a reddish-purple color. Tardieu spots form in these areas as well due to increased pressure. These spots often resemble traumatic hemorrhaging but are a normal part of the decomposition process.

Fact: If a body is moved after death and the livor mortis is on the wrong area of the body, investigators can determine that the body was moved after death. For example, if someone died laying on their stomach, livor mortis would turn the abdomen the reddish-purple color. If someone moved the body after death and flipped them onto their back, it would show that the blood pooled in a way that would defy gravity, showing that the body was moved unnaturally.

At this point, purge fluid is often leaked through the nasal cavity from internal gases building up in the abdomen. Despite this resembling a traumatic death, it is a natural step in human decomposition. Depending on the amount of stomach contents that are left in the body, it generally takes half an hour up to six hours for the body to finish digesting and eliminating the waste from the body.

After about 24 to 26 hours the abdomen begins to turn a greenish color that generally begins in the lower quadrant of the abdomen near the pubic area. Right around this time, bloating begins to take form within the abdominal cavity due to bacterial gas build up that causes the body to bloat and change form almost to the point of the corpse’s race being undistinguishable.

In step three, or active decay, the skin begins to slip from the body in a process known as “degloving.” Degloving happens when the top layer of skin pulls away from the muscle and essentially falls off. When bodies are at this stage of decomposition and the skin makes it impossible to pull fingerprints, morticians will often slip the skin of the patient over their own fingers and extract DNA prints this way. As the body is going through active decay, internal organs and external tissues begin to liquefy and seep through open orifices on the body. Dawnie Wolfe Steadman, director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at University of Tennessee Knoxville, claims that the main cause for the large amount of tissue loss during active decay is because of fly maggots that feast on bacteria and tissues.

Did you know that a body decomposing in water decomposes at a much slower rate than a body that is exposed to air? The slowest rate of decomposition is a body that has been preserved with formaldehyde and buried in the ground, similar to American funeral customs. A body that is submerged in water while going through active decay will have a wax-like appearance that replaces the normal look of external tissues. However, the tissues of a body that decomposes in a warm and humid environment will have external tissues that have completely dried out; the body will essentially mummify itself. In cases where a person dies in a traumatic way and is mummified from external factors, any wounds they received before and after death will be preserved, though distorted in size and shape.

After soft tissues are consumed by maggots, the corpse is partially skeletonized but the tougher soft tissues like cartilage still remain. Once beetles consume the cartilage, ligaments, and tendons the final stage of decomposition begins.

Skeletal decay is the process of the surrounding environment breaking down the remainder of the body for fertilization for future plants and life. Bones generally disintegrate with time if they are subjected to a constant flow of water, gnawed on by scavengers or any other external forces that have the ability to erode them.

Did you know that the “decomposition smell” you smell when coming across an animal carcass is actually caused by a mix of gases called putrescine and cadaverine that is caused when amino acids within the body begin to break down? Although seemingly harmless, if you are in a closed environment with a corpse, these gases have the ability to compete with or displace the oxygen within your body.

A University of Kent psychologist and Arkansas Tech University behavioral scientist hypothesize that the chemical putrescine creates a fight or flight response in humans due to it signaling in the brain as an olfactory threat. In the journal ‘Frontiers of Psychology,’ four different tests were published that proved exposure to putrescine elicited cognitive reactions, similar to escaping threats.

In the first trial done in this series of studies, 60 people were given the task to open a jar and sniff the contents inside. The control group smelled ammonia, a similarly pungent smell to putrescine and the rest of the test subjects were given putrescine. Afterward, the test subjects that were given the task of smelling putrescine reacted quicker to a red dot randomly presented on a screen in the lab; this indicates that the smell made these subjects more vigilant to their surroundings.

Two of these four tests were completed on a university campus when random people were stopped and asked to participate in a smell test. In the subjects that smelled putrescine, they walked away significantly faster than those that smelled ammonia or water. This experiment was timed with a hidden stopwatch.

In the fourth and final experiment, 65 people were asked to fill out a questionnaire that was slightly scented with either putrescine, water, or ammonia; the smell was faint enough that the subjects were unaware of the scent. The subjects were given an essay that was written by someone who didn’t share their views; in this particular case, the essay was written by a Middle-Eastern exchange student in the UK who criticized Western values and predicted their decline. They were then asked to fill out the questionnaire asking how likable the essay’s author was and whether or not his ideas should be publicized. The subjects that had papers scented with putrescine were significantly more hostile towards the foreign student than those with the ammonia soaked questionnaire. This suggests that subconsciously, the scent of putrescine elicited a subsconscious defensive response.

The scientists that ran this experiment hypothesize that the chemical compound in putrescine could serve as a warning signal in the brain that is the forefront of protective responses that help us protect ourselves from potential threats.

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