It's the difficulty of moving this dense sand that causes the problem. The increase is due to the formation of sand sediment, which has a very high viscosity. Difficult to Get Out Ofīut if quicksand becomes less viscous as you struggle, why is it so difficult to escape? The reason, explain the study's authors, is that after its initial liquefaction, quicksand's apparent viscosity (thickness or flow resistance) increases. But when they shook the container a bit harder, the ball descended to the bottom. When they shook it only a little, the bead stayed floating on top. At rest, the bead remained on the surface, despite aluminum's higher density.īut then scientists started shaking the container. But a piece of aluminum will float on top of quicksand until motion causes the sand to liquefy.ĭuring their study, researchers placed an aluminum bead on top of a container of laboratory-created quicksand. Aluminum, for example, has a density of about 2.7 grams per milliliter. You would descend about up to your waist, but you'd go no further.Įven objects with a higher density than quicksand will float on it-until they move. At that level of density, sinking in quicksand is impossible. But human density is only about 1 gram per milliliter. Quicksand has a density of about 2 grams per milliliter. The reason is that humans just aren't dense enough. This causes a trapped body to sink when it starts to move.īut a person moving around in quicksand will never go all the way under. At rest, quicksand thickens with time, but it remains very sensitive to small variations in stress.Īt higher stresses, quicksand liquefies very quickly, and the higher the stress the more fluid it becomes. Researchers in the Netherlands and France studied quicksand, a combination of fine sand, clay, and salt water. Real quicksand is certainly hard to get out of, but it doesn't suck people under the way it always seems to in the movies.Īccording to a study published in the current issue of the journal Nature, it is impossible for a person immersed in quicksand to be drawn completely under. You won't sink in-at least not all the way. Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist.If stumbling into quicksand ranks on your list of worries, don't panic. It is boiling the water you’re swimming in and taking bites out of you, and is not quite finished, not quite understood, until you jump in again, and again, and it cleans the scraps off you. Īnd as it goes, reveals itself as something covered in glitter. and you dipped your foot, from the riverbank into the river, where the piranhas began eating. Preceding us on the trailsides were ruins overgrown, boots stuck in mud, and heads of sunken ampersands. and we shared thick and hearty laughs, and continued into the very dense jungle. The sun was up, and below, and was somewhere overhead. and we remarked on how piranhas, in uncounted numbers, are capable of consuming an entire ampersand in such-and-such a time frame. I trust Clark Moore, a poet who wrote a poem called Ampersands, which starts like this: Who are you going to trust? Some fish expert or Sylvia Plath? “And the fish, the fish- / Christ! They are panes of ice / A vice of knives / A piranha.” In an op-ed in the New York Times, a man who sounds suspiciously like Jacopo Peterman, Elaine’s boss in Seinfeld (“In the Peruvian Amazon, I stood waist-deep in the Rio Napo while catching and releasing piranhas on a hook-and-line”, and “In the flooded grasslands of Venezuela, I drove around tossing a chicken carcass into various bodies of water … ”), assures us we can “swim without fear”. But at least one science writer wants you to know they’re not that bad. They don’t chew: they bite, the meat goes straight into their stomach and they bite again.

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