Man goes off path in search of hot bath. Slips into acidic pool and dies. Park officials did not expect there would be much left of him to recover.
How does the water become so naturally acidic?
There are lots of acidic volcanic compounds, especially sulfur compounds like hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide. Both dissolve in water to produce acidic results. Sulfuric acid is one of the strongest acids around.
The fact that the water is hot also means a lot of potential for water to boil off and concentrate dissolved minerals/acids.
It’s bubbling though fractured volcanic rock, loaded with sulfur.
That makes various sulfur acids, like sulfuric.
From Wikipedia:
Most of those volatile compounds evaporate as gases (carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, etc) which are acidic when dissolved in water.
The chemical reaction may create an ingredient (which know…) that makes it dissolve flesh faster than either the sulfuric acid or that ingredient , on their own…
Or maybe the bacteria in the hot spring helped things along by munching on the 200 or so pounds of organic material dumped in their laps? I dunno, would sulphur-eating extremophiles find a person to be tasty and nutritious?
Plenty of life in Yellowstone hotsprings, even if the environment in them is incompatible with human life.
Probably not. We contain minimal sulphur and they’re not evolved to dig into corpses and would likely only benefit from the increased level of solubles after the guy was soup.
As discussed at length in the other current geyser thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=800137, the water’s not *that *acidic.
It’s acidic like lemon juice or vinegar is acidic. Not like battery acid is acidic.
What destroys the body is simply simmering it in a large stock pot for a day or so. The lemon juice level of acidity just adds some tang to the soup. As do the sulphur compounds. The boiling-ish water does all the work.
Who’s hungry?
Yup. He’d be no better off falling into pH neutral boiling water. With the delay in reaching the area everyone’s better off with a body that disintegrated instead of stewed.
Anyone who is interested in this topic should read Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh, which features a murder by hot-pot, including a discussion of body disintegration. :eek:
Remember the grade-school experiments where you put an egg in a jar with some vinegar and water for a few days - after which point there’s no shell left? I assume the same would apply for bones in a mildly acidic environment, aided by the heat.
Another top ten username/thread title combo.
There are a few different things that turn a lump of flesh into “soup”. Some proteins are soluble, and pretty much become “soup” right away. Others, like collagen and just about everything in connective tissue, are insoluble at normal body temperature but melt at cooking/hot spring temperatures. Yet other proteins are denatured, or what we call “cooked”. That’s basically all that’s relevant on a time scale of normal cooking.
However, with even longer times and higher temperatures, peptide bond hydrolysis becomes significant. And peptide hydrolysis can be catalyzed by either high pH or low pH. So yeah, this aspect of soupification will be faster in an acidic environment, though I don’t know how much of a difference this makes practically speaking.
(How much do normal amounts of lemon juice or vinegar actually change the pH of a pot of soup? You’re really not adding much – one whole cup of vinegar in a 12-quart stock pot makes a ~20 mM solution, and IME more typical quantities would be on a mM scale. I’d expect that most pots of soup are fairly well buffered by proteins, free amino acids, and whatever else contribute to normal physiological pH. If so, adding normal quantities of vinegar or lemon juice will lower the pH below ~7, but not all the way to ~2.)
Thanks for the good chemistry.
I was rebutting what I read as the OP’s implied statement that the body was “dissolved” by strong acid the way things do in cartoons. You know the trope: dip the fish in halfway, see some roiling fumes for a few seconds, then pull out the fish: bottom half a skeleton with the top half intact. Not real. At all.
Rather the reality was that the guy was simply cooked unto soup. With, as you say, some contribution from acidic protein destruction. The heavier chunks sank, the lighter ones are dispersed in the soup, and some small fraction of the total volatilized away on the wind.
Ahh, the aroma of freshly made Darwin Winners. With a soupçon 
of sulphur. Mmm, mmm, good!
The placard at Sulphur Cauldron (not in the Norris Geyser Basin, so I don’t know if the same applies there) says:
Photograph of placard here. Whether or not this contributed, I don’t know. I’m also not sure which is more unpleasant, being boiled or being dissolved.
In that case we’re approaching stomach acid, pH ~1, which does a number on the proteins I eat.
The placard should have added “No swimming, diving, bathing, or wading!”
This reminds me of a very sad incident that occurred on the Big Island the last time I lived in Hawaii. A young lady attempting to take a steam bath in a vent of the Kilauea Volcano slipped farther into the vent, became stuck and was scalded to death by the steam. Her boyfriend tried in vain to save her. Her screams were reportedly horrendous.
People, don’t play around with this stuff.