Letter: Letters: Coffin air

From COLIN BERRY

What are we to make of the report that a cool $500 000 is to be spent
in Maryland on obtaining genuine 17th-century American air from the inside
of – wait for it – an occupied lead coffin (This Week, 29 August)?

I don’t know about you, Dear Editor, but given a choice between a lungful
of Los Angeles photochemical smog and the air surrounding a 300-year-old
cadaver, I would unhesitatingly plump for the former, no matter how ‘perfectly
preserved’ the coffin’s occupant.

Seriously, what can this hugely expensive experiment, with its elaborate
precautions against contamination with modern air, hope to tell its collaborators
about the air in colonial America? They say they are interested in greenhouse
gases, but the article gives few clues to their thinking. For example, carbon
dioxide is not mentioned at all. Presumably the collaborators don’t need
me to tell them that even limited aerobic or anaerobic putrefaction would
vastly increase the amount of this gas over and above its natural levels.

Also, while we normally think of lead as a fairly unreactive metal,
it is common knowledge that it does react slowly with constituents of the
atmosphere to form a surface coating of hydroxides and carbonates. This
is another factor that must alter the composition of moist, trapped air,
even without the complication of a cadaver.

Colin Berry Chesham, Buckinghamshire