There is a crisis in Portugal where bodies have been mummified after being buried.
In order to save space, bodies need to be exhumed frequently so that bones can be placed in smaller containers.
Families are traumatised when their loved ones are repeatedly unearthed and put back to decay.
Nobody knows what happens to the dead in coffins.
The cause of the weird mummifications is being investigated by scientists in Portugal.
The concept of temporary graves was introduced in Portugal in the early 1960s.
The idea is that a decomposing body reduces the amount of space taken up. The bones can be packed into a smaller coffin and moved to a less spacious final resting place.
According to a forensic anthropologist from the University of Coimbra, we don't have enough space to set up new cemeteries or upgrade existing ones.
Three years after the burial, a letter can be sent to the family warning them that the remains need to be moved.
The law states that the body can't be moved if it's already dead.
gravediggers have to dig up the corpse to look at it. Every two years it is buried again if it isn't properly decomposing.
55 to 64 percent of the bodies that were exhumed in Porto between 2006 and 2015 were not completely dead.
Families tend to deal well with the first time, according to the funeral home owner.
The repeated uncoverings can be very emotional.
It can take decades of repeated burial and reburial for the body to reach a final resting place.
The process of mummifying is endless for a small group of bodies.
This happened on its own, unlike Egyptian mummies. When a body dries so quickly that it stops decomposing, it's natural mummification. It has been observed in extreme environments.
It's not clear why it happens so much in Portuguese graves.
Silva Bessa and her colleagues have been researching what could be slowing down the decomposition of these bodies in Portugal as part of her PhD thesis.
She has been taking samples from the bodies and the soil around them.
She told Insider that it was quite amazing. I have different stages of decomposition in the same area.
She said that some bodies are fully skeletonized. Others will be kept mum.
I might have all of the body skeletonized on the same body. She said that you can find a small amount of everything.
Silva Bessa tested the eight properties of the soil to see how they would affect the decomposition.
She hasn't found a breakthrough yet. She thought she'd find a correlation between the soil properties and the state of the body.
She wants to know if certain substances the people took in life were a factor.
The bodies aren't decomposing fully within three years according to a lecturer in forensic sciences at a Dutch university.
He said that a normal body in a grave would take about five years to decay.
Krap uses facilities that have access to donated bodies to study decomposing corpses.
The focus on what happens to the body above the ground is useful for murder investigations but not helpful for understanding regular burials.
Less work looks at what happens to the body after it's buried, which is likely to be more complex.
Krap said that the body is a huge biological bomb that introducesbacteria, tissues, and various juices into the soil.
Variations between people's bodies could be one factor.
There is more information about the process here.
Silva Bessa said that it was a big deal for his country.
Carreira said that people have turned to cremation due to the shortage of graves.
We had four crematoriums fifteen years ago. He said that they had 38 today.
It works if everyone is cremated.
For the Portuguese it's tradition to bury the bodies not to cremate them. It is being squeezed out of existence due to lack of space and a yawning gap in science.
She is trying to find a way to help.
The original article was published by Business Insider.
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