A look into my Research Topic

 

            The research topic that I have been working on is how temperature effects the rate of body decomposition. I think that this topic is important for multiple reasons, one being that the faster a body decomposes, the quicker any biological evidence that may be present on the corpse will disintegrate. This could also play a role in making time of death harder for medical examiners to determine since a body could decompose in a matter of 2 weeks in hotter drier climates, and on the opposing side around a couple months or more in the cooler climates.

                Research on this matter is important to understand not only for time of death determination, but it also helps officials know potentially what they may be looking for when searching for people who may be missing for some time. For example, if a child has been missing for over a month in the state of Arizona in the middle of June, you could safely assume that due to the warm climates outside, you will most likely be looking to locate skeletal remains instead of an intact corpse.

                When it comes to researching this topic, my main go to will be scholarly books and research that has already been conducted. I would love to do an experiment, but given my research topic, I am not sure how possible an experiment will be. Also, observing a rotting corpse in different climates may be hard to achieve.

Variable	I/D/C	Description
Temperature	Independent	Temp. surrounding the corpse.
Rate of Decomposition	Dependent	Based on temp, rate the body decomposes

              Based on my research findings, and any experiment’s that I may be able to perform on the topic I hope to find, does an increase in temperature speed up the process of decomposition of human remains? My hypothesis is, when human remains are in an environment with a higher temperature, they will proceed to decompose at a quicker rate then if they were in a cooler environment.