There are 42 cemeteries that are historically and culturally significant, all group together as Historic Cemeteries of New Orleans. These are distinct from most cemeteries commonly located in the United States in that they are an amalgam of the French, Spanish, and Caribbean historical influences on the city of New Orleans in addition to limitations resulting from the city's high water table. The cemeteries reflect the ethnic, religious, and socio-economic heritages of the city.[1]
Coverage[]
The cemeteries of New Orleans were featured in Waters of Death.
It was introduced in 1,000 years after people when staying above the mud was a prime concern when people thought about their deaths in the time of humans and wanted their embalmed bodies to be safe from floods in above ground stone mausoleums. The first above ground cemetery in New Orleans was built in 1789, the year George Washington became president and it was a practical solution to the problem of burying the dead in soggy ground as well as an imitation of the aristocratic fashion in France and Spain of building impressive family tombs. More than 40 of the so called cities of the dead eventually rose up in New Orleans. Impressive and mysterious, the carved tombs and marble mausoleums not only attracted prospective occupants but also curious tourists. Although some of the above ground cemeteries were flooded during Hurricane Katrina, there was little damage to the tombs or the corpses.
Mud seep into the the tombs and envelop the bodies.
The cities of the dead withstood the worst effects of water for more than 200 years, but in several thousand years, geologic forces will pile up sediments and the city of New Orleans will lie beneath the Mississippi Delta. As the cemeteries were flooded, the dead will lie undisturbed no longer. Jan Zalasiewicz stated that some mud will seep into the coffin which begins to encase and envelop the remains of the body.
The remains turned into oil.
The fate of the bodies were revealed in 10 million years after people when fossilized corpses of New Orleans are a mile and a half underground where pressure and heat combine to cause a further transformation. Jan Zalasiewicz stated that the temperatures will be at boiling water making to bones to be quite dense, the soft tissues carbonized and what's extracted from the soft tissues will begin to form oil where mobile hydrocarbons migrate up through the sediments that accumulated on top of the cemeteries. Humans who explored the Gulf of Mexico for oil has become oil themselves, once exploited to run their cities.
Gallery[]
