Why A Dead Person Floats And A Living Person Sinks
You may have noticed that a dead body will float on water, whereas a living person will nearly instantly sink to the bottom of the pool. Given that a dead body is almost twice as heavy as a living body, have you ever wondered why this is the case?......CONTINUE READING THE ARTICLE FROM THE SOURCE>>>>>
In light of this, I’m going to discuss the mechanics behind why a living person drowns and a dead one floats in this article.
Before we go any further, I want to make sure you have a solid grasp of the Archimedes Principle, which describes how and why something floats when it is placed in water.
According to the principle of Archimedes, the amount of weight that a body displacing in a fluid contributes to the amount of buoyant force that acts upward on the body. This applies whether the body is completely or partially submerged in the fluid. To put it another way, for something to float on water, the volume of water that it must displace must be equal to the mass of the object itself.
This helps to explain why a dead body would float after it has been decomposed.
When a deceased body is placed in a body of water, the lungs gradually fill with water, causing the body to sink to the bottom of the body of water. The dead body will remain underwater until the process of decomposition has produced sufficient gas to cause it to float to the surface.
As bacteria consume the decomposing carcass, they produce gases such as carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. These gases inflate the body, which in turn causes it to float because it has been propelled higher. The entire process could take anywhere from one to two weeks, depending on a variety of factors such as the temperature, the amount of sunshine available, and so on.
Why does a body that is still alive sink?
When a live body is submerged in water, it will eventually sink because the volume of water it takes in cannot support its weight. Studies have shown that people who have a bigger amount of muscle sink more rapidly because muscles are more dense than water, whereas people who have a greater amount of body fat float for a longer period of time because fat is less dense than water.