While Sydney and West Jerusalem may not be facing the problem of surfacing corpses, they are confronting shrinking space. Sydney’s major cemeteries are projected to run out of room in 30 years, and Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park even earlier, in 15 years. The cemetery’s new $7.9 million catacombs—a multi-story, car park-like structure—would provide an additional 7,000 burial spaces, but families could choose to eventually take remains from the graves and put them in nearby ossuary boxes, freeing up space for new burials. "You can create perpetuity for centuries for the same grave," park CEO Graham Boyd told Singapore’s Straits Times.

The more than 200,000 burial spaces in West Jerusalem’s Har Hamenuchot cemetery are nearly full. The catacombs below will add another 22,000 crypts, assembled floor to ceiling in three levels. The first interments are slated to occur later this year, when the first tunnels are completed, but construction won’t be finished for at least another four years. The project’s cost is $50 million, and is mainly funded by the sale of burial plots.

Human skulls and bones are stacked in a room in Paris's catacombs.
Human skulls and bones are stacked in a room in Paris's catacombs. - Paris created its catacombs when its cemeteries overflowed. The tipping point came in 1780, when a particularly heavy spring rain caused a wall around Les Innocents, the city’s largest and oldest cemetery, to collapse, and rotting corpses tumbled into a neighboring property. The city moved the remains of between six and seven million people to underground limestone quarries that had been mined to build the metropolis—and which needed to be filled, as houses and roads were collapsing in on them due to faulty building practices. © Charles Platiau/Reuters