![]() Viscosity decreases after an initial stress. The tide regularly refreshes the surface and smooth implies solid to people. In live action, budget and set-design constraints sometimes lead to a "quicksand pit" barely large enough to hold the actor.Īlthough not always strictly "sand", tidal flats (mudflats) have mud which is actually closer to the danger portrayed in fiction as quicksand. Writers are traditionally unfettered by such technicalities, placing them in the desert or away from a river or any apparent source of water, although a hidden spring could in theory create quicksand in surprising places. Okay, if you are weighed down by something you can't remove, you could sink, but that would even happen in boring, old regular water. ![]() Survival guides stress the importance of staying still if this starts to happen. Also it is possible to struggle badly enough in a panic that you actually do drag yourself down instead of up. While animals and people do die in quicksand, it's almost never from the sand or drowning - it's from exposure or dehydration after exhausting themselves struggling against the sand - with the right combination of sand, clay, water, and salt, it is nearly impossible to escape the stuff without help. In fact, real quicksand is so dense that you can't sink in it the usual advice for someone who finds themselves caught in deep quicksand is to simply relax and float on their back. In truth, quicksand (while real) isn't terribly common, and exerts none of its movie counterpart's mythical "sucking" power. Although most victims blunder blindly into quicksand, it sometimes seems that the merest touch of an extremity is enough to pull the unwary into its muddy and all-consuming depths like iron filings to a magnet. Quicksand is a common and deadly element of jungle and desert terrain, and its most dangerous feature is its ability to suck people and animals down and drown them in a malevolent blend of sand and water. PAGES WILL BE DELETED OTHERWISE IF THEY ARE MISSING BASIC MARKUP. DON'T MAKE PAGES MANUALLY UNLESS A TEMPLATE IS BROKEN, AND REPORT IT THAT IS THE CASE. ![]() THIS SHOULD BE WORKING NOW, REPORT ANY ISSUES TO Janna2000, SelfCloak or RRabbit42. The Trope workshop specific templates can then be removed and it will be regarded as a regular trope page after being moved to the Main namespace. All new trope pages will be made with the "Trope Workshop" found on the "Troper Tools" menu and worked on until they have at least three examples.Pages that don't do this will be subject to deletion, with or without explanation. All new pages should use the preloadable templates feature on the edit page to add the appropriate basic page markup. All images MUST now have proper attribution, those who neglect to assign at least the "fair use" licensing to an image may have it deleted.Failure to do so may result in deletion of contributions and blocks of users who refuse to learn to do so. Before making a single edit, Tropedia EXPECTS our site policy and manual of style to be followed.Quicksand does occur in deserts, but only very rarely: where loosely packed sands occur, such as on the down-wind sides of dunes, the amount of sinking is limited to a few centimeters, because once the air in the voids is expelled the grains are too densely packed to allow further compaction.Īnswer originally published on October 7, 2002. In such cases, the loose packing is maintained by the upward movement of water. Most quicksand occurs in settings where there are natural springs, either at the base of alluvial fans (cone-shaped bodies of sand and gravel formed by rivers flowing from mountains), along riverbanks or on beaches at low tide. The sand collapses, or becomes 'quick,' when additional force from loading, vibration or the upward migration of water overcomes the friction holding the grains together. This arrangement is similar to a house of cards in that the space between the cards is significantly greater than the space occupied by the cards. Because many sand grains are elongate rather than spherical, loose packing of the grains can produce sand in which voids make up 30 to 70 percent of the mass. In normal sand, grains are packed tightly together to form a rigid mass, with about 25 to 30 percent of the space (voids) between the grains filled with air or water. Quicksand is a mixture of sand and water, or sand and air, that looks solid, but becomes unstable when disturbed by any additional stress. Long, a sedimentologist at the department of earth sciences at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, explains.
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