One of my favorite episodes of *Penn & Teller’s Bullshit *was a polemic against spending so much money on funerals and interments. The program included a demonstration of what happened to a corpse in a sealed vault, claiming that the heat caused by the bacteria decomposing the body, with no way to dissipate in an airtight seal, effectively explodes the body like a pressure cooker. However, I’ve never seen this in any other source; in fact, I’ve seen it implied that embalming keeps the corpse reasonably intact for quite a long time. What’s the straight dope? Is Penn & Teller’s pressure cooker assertion bullshit? Or is the truth about what happens to most bodies after a middle-class burial so repellent that it is almost never spoken of?
Embalming (or at least the kind used by morticians) isn’t meant to keep the body intact for a long time at all; it’s just mean to keep it suitable for public viewing for a few extra days without the need for refrigeration.
Need answer fast?
Not so much. A little while back, my boss kind of idly asked me what his dad’s body was like having been buried for a little while. (No idea how we got on that topic. These things happen.) I flashed to the Penn & Teller episode, but my very weak social filter actually won out and I managed to tap-dance around that question. Since I haven’t seen anything suggestion the Barons of Bullshit were correct, however (as in details from exhumations and whatnot), I thought I’d take my case to the Dope.
I don’t see how an everso airtight vault could prevent heat from dissipating. Are we talking about something like an ideal Dewar flask?
ETA: And I guess all bacteria would be dead long before boiling temperature…
The Master speaks.
ETA: Death ninja’d.
Dead bodies are dead. They rot. A “sealed” container may be sealed against the outside elements. But it doesn’t do anything about the bacteria present in the body to begin with. Embalming instills a certain amount of bug-killer in place of a certain amount of normal bodily fluids. But the replacement is far short of total.
In the end, all non-cremated critters turn to soup and/or sludge plus some bones. Which for a natural burial or an animal in the wild, sorta seeps into the dirt. For a burial in a mostly sealed can, the soup sits there until it eventually coagulates and/or evaporates.
Messy & stinky. That’s about all we really need to remember.
Sounds like if you’re going to spring for a sealed sarcophagus you should not skimp out on true mummification. On the other hand, if decomposition isn’t an issue I do not see why even a coffin is necessary versus simple burial.
Or get the best of two worlds and go drown yourself in a bog. 
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
The author doesn’t describe just how preserved the corpse was but since John Hans was stored in a pretty non-airtight above ground hut, I’m betting most buried and sealed american corpses are going to hang around for a while, too.
There are places where you can be buried without any casket or headstone, basically in a forest, but I’m pretty sure some U.S. states prohibit this–undoubtedly due to funeral industry lobbying. In the past there might have been issues with contamination of the water table, but formalin doesn’t do a lot for a healthy body either.
If a body is decaying, a number of factors come in to play.
Water retention:
There is a lot of water in a human body. Bacteria don’t do well when things dry out, so trapping the water in with the body is important. Otherwise, things dry out and bacterial decay slows down and the body may mummify.
Oxygen or the lack thereof:
There are two types of bacteria - those that need oxygen (aerobic) and those that don’t (anaerobic). There are both types of bacteria in the human body. In a small sealed space, aerobic bacteria start the decay process, and then (as the oxygen runs out) anaerobic bacteria take over. Anaerobic decay is slower, and leaves stinking residue, with adipocere (fatty acids from the anaerobic decomposition).
Temperature:
Bacterial decomposition significantly rates depend on the temperature.
Wet anaerobic decomposition is what slowly turns bodies into adipocere and foul-smelling black soup. In a small hermetically sealed container, this is the most likely result.
In a large sealed vault, the body will probably dry out more, and there will be more aerobic decay and maybe mummification.
This advertising slogan explains why Bob’s AAA Discount Funeral Home never attracted much business.
According to this site, “green burial” is legal in all 50 states (whatever that entails), most states don’t require embalming and backyard burial is OK if you’ve got enough acreage.
And here I am in flippin Nebraska. Of all the states to require a funeral director, I wouldn’t have expected it to be ours.
I like your post/sig combo,Stus.
The body can’t explode because the undertaker uses a metal implement shaped kind of like a big pointy bullet to jab into the abdomen and puncture all the internal organs.