Instead, they floated atop the surface, never more than half-submerged.īut as Bonn told the journal Nature, the biggest danger of quicksand is getting stuck in it on a beach during low tide, and then being drowned when the tide comes in. Even though the quicksand collapsed, the beads didn't get sucked under. They then placed aluminum beads with the same density as a typical human body atop the mixture, and shook it. In a 2005 study, University of Amsterdam researcher Daniel Bonn - who had heard cautionary stories about quicksand from shepherds while on a visit to Iran - and colleagues replicated quicksand in a laboratory. It's found most often in river deltas and sometimes on beaches, but it also can be created by earthquakes that release water from underground aquifers and destabilize sandy soil.īut while quicksand is real, the idea that you could be sucked under its surface and completely disappear just isn't so.
This means that the friction between sand particles is reduced, and the overall mass becomes unable to support the weight that dry sand could. To understand what it can and can't do, it's important to know just what quicksand actually is - just a bunch of ordinary sand that becomes saturated with water. If quicksand doesn't haunt our collective media-induced nightmares with the frequency that it once did, one reason may be scientists' and outdoors experts repeated debunking of the menace as depicted on the big and small screens. But since then, the shock value of quicksand seems to have worn off, and it's pretty much vanished from popular culture - except for a recent humorous appearance in a Geico commercial, where the protagonist fruitlessly implores a house cat to save him from being smothered. Mark Williamson/Getty Imagesīack in the 1950s and 1960s, TV and movie screenwriters desperate to finish a script would fall back upon a convenient, if hackneyed, plot twist: A character steps into a pit of quicksand, requiring a dramatic rescue to keep them from being sucked under. Contrary to the popular image of quicksand occurring in the desert, it's more common near streams, marshes and on the beach.
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