Separated at Death
I can’t believe I missed this! They solved the mystery of the severed feet!
In case you’re not up on this one, beginning around 2007, severed (or to be more precise, disarticulated) feet have occasionally washed up on beaches in the Pacific Northwest in both the US and in Canada, along the coast of the Salish Sea. (I had never heard of the Salish Sea until the feet mystery made it famous.) All of the feet were in sneakers, except for one that was in a boot. This gruesomeness happens so often that the government in British Columbia actually keeps a map of locations where feet are found.
Of course, this mystery lent itself to all manner of weird theories: serial killers, aliens, seafaring foot cults, a mad scientist trying to build a transporter and having some disturbing technical glitches (OK, there were weird theories, but the last two I just made up. I’m wasted at Discover; I should be writing for The National Enquirer.) But before things got too crazy, scientists stepped in with their DNA kits. Most of the feet turned out to have belonged to people who’d been reported missing, and the cause of death was usually ruled suicide or accident.
But that doesn’t explain how these people’s feet, and only their feet, ended up on this particular stretch of beach. And why have the feet kept washing ashore for almost two decades?
So that’s where I was with this story until a few days ago, when I stumbled upon an article in National Geographic announcing the solution. The explanation is cool (though, to be honest, not nearly as cool as the transporter thing). And some of it is kind of gross, involving bloating cadavers (and some that don’t bloat) and microbes and sea animals feeding on dead bodies, and, well, you get the picture. But the short of it is that sometimes dead bodies sink to the bottom of the ocean where they are stripped down to their skeletons by the aforementioned creatures. Because ankles are made mostly of tendons and connective tissue, it’s fairly easy for a hungry scavenger to chew the foot right off the rest of the skeleton.
Now we get to the sneaker part. Sneakers made in recent years often have gas-filled pockets or foam that float. So, once removed from the rest of the skeleton, the sneaker-clad foot floats to the surface.
But why the Salish Sea? According to the article in National Geographic, a scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle tackled the mystery using a computer model he designed to track oil spills. The model showed that once something ends up in the Salish Sea, it’s not likely to get back out. Prevailing winds there are westerlies, so flotsam comes in rather than going out. So if your dead body ends up there, it stays there (What dies in the Salish Sea stays in the Salish Sea?), but not necessarily on the bottom. That depends, at least in part, on your choice of footwear.
So that’s the end of the mystery of the severed feet — uh-oh, mea culpa. The researchers would prefer that we not use the term ”severed,” since that implies that the feet were cut off, not chewed off by sea animals. So instead let’s say that ends the mystery of the disarticulated feet.
’til next time,
Avery
If you have friends or family who might enjoy this newsletter, please tell them about it! They can sign up here. And of course, just like you, they can unsubscribe any time, and I will never share email addresses or collect data about my subscribers.