Man dies in Yellowstone hot spring. How does the water get so acidic?

[Musicat]

@Ignatz

The placard should have added “No swimming, diving, bathing, or wading!”

…or dissolving?

[Ale]

@LSLGuy

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.

I don’t know about Yellowstone, but water can get very acidic in nature due to geothermal activity.
I’ve been to the Kawah Ijen volcano a few times and the lake there has a rather unpleasant pH level of 0.5, which is way more corrosive than gastric acid, the compounds spewing from the vents react with the water in the air and turn into sulfuric acid, inside the crater all the rock surfaces are covered in a layer of grey, dissolved rock sludge.
On top of that the gasses coming out of the vents burn in a bright blue colour, going down that crater is like landing on another planet.

[lazybratsche]

@LSLGuy

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.

Agreed. I suspect the effect of pH is modest in this case, maybe reducing the time-to-complete-soupification from 3 days to 2 days.

In the lab, I’ve had problems with peptide hydrolysis degrading my [del]maggot smoothies[/del] [del]fly soup[/del] precious samples. At temperatures just short of boiling and at a time scale of 10 minutes to a few hours, a modest pH shift from ~7 to ~8.5 can degrade a significant fraction of proteins that I’ve analyzed. Typically, though, the degradation products are a handful of distinct fragments, indicating that a few specific peptide bonds are more vulnerable to hydrolysis. At that rate, it’d take many hours or days to hydrolyze the protein all the way to free amino acids.

[LSLGuy]

I’d like to hear more about why you’re making maggot smoothies and what you and your employer hope to gain by whatever wondrous knowledge you surely gain from this bizarre practice.

Perhaps you could do a “Ask the Mad Scientist” thread. Maybe we could get the other chem/bio lab Dopers to chime in. I’m sure you and you colleagues have some amazing stories.

[lazybratsche]

@LSLGuy

I’d like to hear more about why you’re making maggot smoothies and what you and your employer hope to gain by whatever wondrous knowledge you surely gain from this bizarre practice.

Perhaps you could do a “Ask the Mad Scientist” thread. Maybe we could get the other chem/bio lab Dopers to chime in. I’m sure you and you colleagues have some amazing stories.

Hah, I’m flattered but I can’t justify spending any amount of time on a thread like that. And I’m not sure I can tell any “interesting” stories while holding on to any shred of anonymity.

For my research, I’m trying to finish up a PhD studying the processing of a signaling protein, using fruit flies as a model organism. The protein gets chopped up in different ways which seem to produce very distinct biological functions. (Which is why I’m paying attention to protein hydrolysis: I need to be sure that the protein is cut up in the organism, and not during sample preparation.)

“Maggot smoothie” is just the first step of isolating the signaling protein from the larvae. And I’m only making a few mL at a time.

/hijack