OK, I’m in. What’s the schedule of Old Faithful, and would the body decompose enough so chunks wouldn’t rain down on visitors right on time? How deep is it? Could you toss someone in there who is still living, and no one would hear him as he awaits his certain doom? And if so, cement shoes needed, because otherwise he could clamber out?
Which leads me to wonder what exactly that primal gook is that heats the steam out…the chemical content versus the simple heat as a means of making a body leave no traces in a certain time…
I’m not even sure how Old Faithful differs from other fumaroles (did I just made that word up?[sup]1[/sup]) and lava lips.[sup]2[/sup]
One would die rather quickly due to parboiling … and the body would probably be expelled during the next eruption … good questions, let us know how it works out …
The pools in Yellowstone are not only super heated, they are acidic and will quickly decompose a body, as evidenced by the young man looking to “hotpot” last November. Make sure the body is naked though so there’s no acid-resistant evidence left behind.
ETA: Don’t go to Old Faithful, where everyone and his mother is standing there watching it. You’ll need to surreptitiously go off trail to one of the springs that people are not allowed to get to because walking on the crust is quite dangerous.
I was thinking of the surface pools (as mentioned by BEG) but here is what Old Faithful looks like in cross-section (from this article.) So, depending on how rough or slippery the slope near the top is, the body could tumble down tens of meters at least, and who knows how much deeper.
We had a thread about the November accident that went into some of the effects of hot acid springs on a body. Essentially, the hot springs have the ideal conditions for turning any lump of living tissue to soup. Proteins will be hydrolyzed into small peptides, and even bone will dissolve. But it happens over the course of hours to days, not instantly in a mass of sizzling green foam like you see on TV.
And the pools are something anyone with two brain cells to rub together would cautiously steer around, so any undissolved bones sitting on the bottom of the pools are likely to go unnoticed essentially forever.
The only cooking term I can associate with this is ‘rapid boiling’. You wouldn’t be fricasseed because there’s no sauce involved and you haven’t been cut up into pieces (although the cutting up part could precede the immersion). It’s not braising unless the victim is lightly fried first (another possibility if you have a large enough utensil and some oil available). It’s too rapid a process a for stewing, although you could suspend the victim over one of the steaming outlets.
A high alkali content in any of the springs might allow the victim to be pulled out after a short time and then roasted in an oven like a bagel or hot pretzel leaving a chewy brown skin. Don’t try this with a clown, you’ll find that…
Yeah, and it’s not so much the acidity (which is that of lemon juice) so much as the fact that you’re at a simmer or boil the whole time. If you’ve ever made stock, you know what happens to meat and bone after a long time. Bone will turn brittle and dissolve eventually, acid or no acid.
Presuming the geyser wasn’t actively gushing, and presuming your victim was alive when pushed into the vent, the most likely method of death would be blunt force trauma from the inital fall. After that, assuming death wasn’t immediate, then thermal injuries wuold be the next cause - It’s HOT down there. Racing with thermal injuries would be asphixiation - It’s NOT a pleasant atmosphere down there.
Of course, at the next eruption, TriPolar’s menu of options comes into play.
I imagine an eruption of old faithful would shred you pretty good. The highest plumes reach up to 185 feet; that means the water stream down inside the nozzle would hit you with at least 90 PSI, probably considerably more. In addition to rapidly cooking your flesh, I expect it would peel fragile cooked flesh (your skin, at the least) from uncooked flesh - or, failing that, it might hurl you intact from the vent, only to have you fall from an injurious height back to ground level.
So you’d be burned, poisoned, dismembered, and bludgeoned. We hope you enjoyed your visit, Mr. Rasputin.
Reminds me of that unbearable H. G. Wells short story where some chap who ‘loved’ a woman pushes his rival into a bubbling steel ( or something ) vat, then has to chuck lumps of coal at his struggling body to end his suffering.
Just to clarify some specifics of Old Faithful geyser.
[ul]
[li]It’s a geyser, not a hot pool, mud pot, or fumarole. People get burned or die when when wade or jump into hot pools because of their ignorance, stupidity or sheer carelessness. Geysers not so much.[/li][li]Mud pots are hot pools full of mud. Not so appealing as hot pools, beauty-wise so the instance of burns or death is probably less that hot pools. Mud pots though have their intrinsic beauty. The mud adds another flavor to it. For those with 12-year-old boy smartassness, the particular sounds created by mud pools is akin to dying and going to loud fart heaven, complete with appropriate odors and smells. Where people encounter problems with mud pots usually are the bigger ones that resemble small volcanoes. They either climb up the small incline only to have it give way and fall into the mud pot, or just attempt to walk to the edge of one where the lip is lower and it gives way. The easily available mud pots are well-marked and protected (for the most part). It’s the off-trail ones that kill and leave no trace. I know of several 30-50 feet across, boiling, blowing and constantly rolling that if you fall in, you’re gone. Gone as in not recoverable. Instantly gone.[/li][li]Think of fumaroles as big steam vents for the most part. They can just hiss, or roar. Smell terribly most of the time. Forget trying to hold a long handled fry pan over one to cook your eggs and bacon. Many are acidic. No pan, cast iron or otherwise, would survive. Death by fumarole is probably rare due to their limited physical openings, extreme steam heat and noise.[/li][li]Geysers may have intricate plumbing underground, but not so much up top. Think of them as wine bottles with long necks. Some with exquisite above ground mineral deposits.[/li][li]Old Faithful has a very large slowly building cone (where you stand on the boardwalk to view it is the edge of the cone), building up at the last few feet to a small lip. Just inside the lip and into the bowels of the earth it’s not a big straight-thru opening. The mineral deposits have created a craggy opening, kinda like stepping across multiple large round rocks when crossing a fast flowing stream. But you cannot make out individual rocks as its all rounded mineral deposits. The actual “pool” at the mouth of Old Faithful is rather small, relatively speaking, maybe 5-10 feet across and not very deep. But “pool” is an unfair description because unless its in its eruptive phase, it’s empty. The best you can do is probably get stuck in the throat of Old Faithful and upon eruption, get blown sky high. (There’s gotta be a slapstick joke in this.)[/li][/ul]
How do I know the details? I’ve been to the very mouth of Old Faithful on two occasions. One was the dead of night (1am?) as we lassoed a half dozen horses that had escaped from the ranger corral. Apparently the ground vegetation around the geyser is very appetizing for them. Anyways, we didn’t have real lassos but a ranger belt around the necks of the lead horses meant all the rest would follow.
The other time was a summer afternoon. Picture perfect weather. Thousands all on the boardwalk waiting. The park geologist walked into the ranger station and asked for someone in uniform. I said yes. He needed one of us to escort him (he was in civvies) to the very lip of Old Faithful so he could take water samples (probably every 30 seconds, I can’t remember exactly) as the eruption got closer and closer. It was a thrill of a lifetime, including the very last second when he said let’s go. He had his half-dozen samples. We turned our backs, no more than ten feet way, and up went Old Faithful in full glory. We were upwind but still got a warm-hot misty shower, all probably caught by thousands of cameras. The geologist did say we need to clean our glasses while still wet because the mineral deposits when dried destroys the lenses (as it unrepairable).
