This only happens in desert areas and is caused by air reaching the lower levels of the sand which turns it into more of a liquid. This is another way quicksand is formed, through the sudden agitation of the ground when waters present, but this normally doesn’t have the opportunity to form this way in nature, unless perhaps by wild animals in the area or a small earthquake if you happen to be in the right area of the world.įortunately its never normally more than 3 to 4 feet deep, and since it’s denser than people are you should float after sinking a certain depth and wont reach the bottom of it anyway. If you stand on the spot you’ve jogged on and wiggle your feet around you’ll start to sink. All you need to do is find a flat area of sand with a good amount of surface water on top, then simply jog up and down for a couple of minutes to mix the water and sand together. You can actually create your own quicksand on the beach. It is formed when water is trapped within a certain area within the right kind of material (sand, clay etc), if the water within the area cannot escape it effectively forms an underground pond filled with sand, and since the water is heavier than the sand, it often looks like normal dry sand on the surface. The sand becomes unstable due to the water content and so does not pack down when weight is applied like normal sand, but instead moves round the object swallowing it up. It is simply sand, clay or silt that has been saturated by water, causing it to become more of a liquid than a solid.
#Stuck in quicksand movie#
Most people who have been killed by quicksand have died from some other knock on effect from getting trapped, such as exposure or being trapped in a tidal area, so you can forget the movie effects of being sucked down into a bottomless pit that can swallow a person in seconds.
The reason its so hard to drown after getting trapped is because quicksand is denser than the human body, which means that the deepest you can possibly sink is normally little past your waist. Having said that it is still responsible for the deaths of a good number of people, but the vast majority of these didn’t involve drowning in the sand itself. The required force to pull a foot out is "about that needed to lift a medium-sized car," write the researchers.When people hear the word quicksand they normally picture some kind of death trap that will suck you under and drown you, but the reality is that quicksand isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as people think. The downside: You're going to have to be pretty strong to get out of quicksand. Quicksand has a chance to settle if it's not upset by movement, the study shows. It sank to the bottom of the container with a lot of shaking. The bead stayed afloat with minimal shaking. The bead and quicksand were shaken to simulate movement. The bead was about as dense as humans and animals. Lastly, they put an aluminum bead on the quicksand. "The higher the stress, the more liquid the quicksand becomes, so movement by a trapped body causes it to sink deeply," they write. The ingredients: fine sand, clay, and saltwater.
Instead, they headed to a lab for tests.įirst, they brewed their own quicksand. They didn't toss anyone into quicksand in the name of science. How did Bonn's team come by this knowledge? Naturally, they did an experiment. "Any unfortunate victim should sink halfway into the quicksand, but could then take solace from the knowledge that there would be no risk of being sucked beneath the surface," the researchers write. That is, as long as that unlucky person doesn't flail around. "A person trapped in salt-lake quicksand is not in any danger of being sucked under completely," write Bonn and colleagues in Nature. Just go with it until things settle down, note researchers including Daniel Bonn, PhD, a physics professor at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Here goes: If you're ever stuck in quicksand, don't thrash around. The rest of us can file it under disaster remedies we'll hopefully never need, unless we're scripting a thriller. Of course, the fictional 007 superspy probably has this tip down cold. 28, 2005 - Every now and then, scientists come up with findings that ought to go straight to James Bond.
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