bodies {what eventually happened to the ones in the ocean?}

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What happened to all of the bodies that were floating in the water?

-- Gaile (lrc@usit.net), January 21, 1998

Answers

Response to bodies

Re: lifevests and bodies not sinking

After a while (a day or so) in heavy seas, the life vests would have been worked off the bodies by wave action, as would clothes.

When a terrorist bomb brought down an Air India 747, most of the bodies recovered from the sea were naked.

-- Thomas M. Terashima (tom@nucleus.com), January 22, 1998.


Response to bodies

See the answer to "How many people went down with the ship?"

-- Bob Gregorio (rgregori@pacbell.net), January 21, 1998.

Response to bodies

That's a good question. They were frozen. As Einstein said, they have life jackets on. So, rescuers might have pulled them up and gave the bodies to their families. I think I't unfair that Jack sank! (anybody wants to comment on that?)

-- Colleen (Colleendi@earthlink.net), January 22, 1998.

Response to bodies

Jack WASN'T wearing a life jacket!!!

-- Laura (lrc@usit.net), January 22, 1998.

Response to bodies

I wish I remembered where I read this but....I read that they later went back and recovered just a little over 300 corpses. The ones that could be identified as first class ( have no idea how they figured that out...dress?) were sent on for proper land burial. The rest of the classes and crew bodies that were recovered were bundled up in cloth and buried at sea. Fitting place. I would imagine that the rest of the bodies had already sunk due to wave action or lack of lifevests...as poor Jack did.

-- Connie Ostlund (sorka@teleport.com), January 26, 1998.


Response to bodies

Actually, Dr. Ballard tells what happened with some of the bodies. Once bodies were dead, the lungs were filled with water, the same way we saw in the movie about Jack. Once sunken, because the bodies go down to the bottom of the ocean, due to high pressure and low temperature, the bodies start to decay but there is no gas formation and they cannot reach the surface. The bodies and most clothes were eaten up by marine animals. In Dr. Ballard's book about the rediscovery of Titanic, there is a picture of a pair of shoes, from somebody who sunk and decayed. The picture is quite emotional...

-- Dan Draghici (ddraghic@ccs.carleton.ca), January 27, 1998.

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