Stages of Decay - In Cold Temperatures?

If the temperature is below freezing for significant parts of the day, they'd freeze and be close to their original appearance at death. If the temperature is above freezing, but seriously cold, then bug life would be reduced, and putrification would be reduced. The body could look very close to how it looked at death.

Damage from predators like wolves and bears could be significant.

After two days at room temperature, you'd have some significant odor, a very grey color, some maggots and other bugs, and the beginnings of some damage. Many people upon seeing the body would have no doubt about death, and some would lose their lunch.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

"...skeletonization can occur in less than six weeks in summer and four months in winter, despite freezing temperatures."

http://www.mendeley.com/catalog/dec...on-medical-examiners-office-edmonton-alberta/

aimeestates said:

"...skeletonization can occur in less than six weeks in summer and four months in winter, despite freezing temperatures."/

Click to expand...

By no means necessarily true. Story:

Back in the 1920s, two British climbers named Mallory and Irvine made an attempt on Mt. Everest, at that time never ascended. Within a few hundred feet of the summit they were engulfed in clouds, and never came down. Their fate remained a mystery until a few years ago, when Mallory's corpse was found. He had fallen to his death and lain there for decades. His body was very well preserved. And still is. It remains where he fell, there being no way to retrieve it at that altitude. Irvine has never been found.

The remains of woolly mammoths, extinct now for ten thousand or more years, have been found in Siberian ice, in preservational conditions which not only allow DNA studies, but are still edible.

caw

I realize all situations are different, but a body left inside a freezing room and a woolly mammoth encapsulated in ice are no comparison. My point was more--there's info on the interwebs, and this particular study, which is talking about loose time frames, came from a medical examiner in Canada (chilly?) and it's hosted on a government website. Can't be ALL bad...

Bodies are destroyed by four different forces.

Decomposition is what a body would do in isolation from other sources. Animal damage is from things as small as maggots to as big as bears. Big predators can do a lot of damage quickly. Weather damage is damage from heat, rain, humidity, and cold. And the last is damage from soils depending upon its composition.

How anything dead disappears is going to be a function of those four factors. How it is going to play out depends upon the interaction of those four factors. For instance, Mount Everest has no animal damage to speak of, extreme cold resulting in the body freezing, no soil to speak of, leaving just weather damage. Hence good preservation.

Something dying on the edge of a swamp in the tropics has tons of bugs, big predators, heat, moisture, acidic soils frequently, which combine to rapid decomposition.

All someone can give to this question is a S*W*A*G (scientific wild ass guess) based upon the very minimal material provided. The further out you go, the more variables come into play.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

The relative humidity/moisture might also have an impact. I recently read about the discovery of mummified seals in certain parts of Antarctica. It's bitterly cold there, but Antarctica is technically a desert because there is virtually no actual precipitation falling from the sky. A body in that environment would basically be freeze-dried because it would lose all the moisture.

Of course, this would probably not be an issue in St. Petersburg (or, frankly, in most parts of the world). Just what popped into my mind when I saw this thread.