Honestly as a kid I thought that quicksand would be a way bigger problem in life considering how many TV shows and movies I saw that used it.
But basically, what is it, how is it formed, how common is it, that kind of stuff. I live on the US East coast so (to my knowledge) I’ve never encountered it
In: Planetary Science
“would be a way bigger problem” I really LOL’d at that. Thanks for the laugh on a crappy day
Quicksand is a mix of water and sand that acts like a liquid. It may or may not be muddy, depending on the fineness of the grains. We fished where a creek entered into a river. In low water, the creek would deposit sand at the mouth. Fresh sand rolls along the creek bottom until it gets to slower river water, then it lightly settles. Given time, the water squeezes out, but sand can build up pretty fast. It acts like jello. Then the river level raises, sweeps away the sand bar, lowers, and everything resets. I have sunk to my waist in that sand. Doing that squeezes the water out and hardens the sand.
A classic demonstration:
Fill a large bucket with sand. Then poke a garden hose to the bottom. Turn on the water and wait for it to immerse the sand completely. Now stand in the bucket, move your feet and note what happens.
Natural analogues to this do exist, especially around springs, but they are rarer than generally supposed.
It’s a smelly mucky water/sand/mud/slime mix, into which you can sink, and find it extremely difficult to get out of.
I’d only seen it in the cartoons and only encountered it for real when I was 30-ish.
It was on the bank of a river estuary in Wales. There was a warning sign on the riverbank, but we had walked along the sand bank at low tide and approached from the water-side so didn’t see the sign. I evidently avoided it, but the friend I was with who was a few minutes behind me sunk in one leg halfway up his shin, and there were loads of abandoned shoes and wellyboots in there.
You’ll occasionally come in contact with it here in central California during wet seasons. I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going the first time I did, and I lost a brand new pair of boots in it. It’s rarely very deep here, but you will get stuck.
Quicksand is a water/sand mixture that has enough motion to stop the sand from settling into clear layers of sand and water. This is ussually caused by a spring bubbling up through a confined sand pocket. It has enough sand in the mix to look like sand, but enough water that it behaves like a liquid.
Oh god, all of them Are Wrong And in my language it Is luquid sand. Quick sand Is made by pocked of air underneath sand. You step on it, there Is earth fart, the underground stable structure collapse And you fall into hole with sand. IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE WET.
You’ve probably have had a shoe/ boot ripped off with walking in dense mud, basically that but deeper. Wet sand. But unless you but some effort into it you aren’t going to get sucked in to the point where you drown, I guess you could get pretty stuck and sit there until you die, but when’s the last time you’ve actually heard of a quicksand death? I imagine you’d get out.
Is quicksand fear still a thing, that and the Bermuda triangle were two things to be feared, but I can’t say I’ve noticed them in popular culture, or whatever recently.
I believe I was caught by quicksand once.
We were walking through the woods in Florida near a creek. In one area the creek got narrow and we walked around it. Suddenly my left leg sunk into the ground, and I was almost laying flat. We brushed the leaves away and my leg was sunk in wet sand. I slowly pulled my leg and didn’t even lose my boot.
My guess is that the creek was at a point where it was running under the surface and the sand was being agitated enough to act semisolid. There was a lot of organic matter like leaves and branches that hid it all from view.
We did the rest of the hike using walking sticks.
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