Quicksand once offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement. It was a plot device unburdened by character or story. People started sinking, and they either survived or disappeared under what often looked like a big puddle of lumpy oatmeal. Typically, all that was left sitting on the surface was a pith helmet.

So what exactly is quicksand, and can you actually drown in it?

Quicksand is a colloid consisting of fine granular material (such as sand, silt or clay) and water. When water in the (say) sand cannot escape, it creates a liquefied soil that cannot support weight.

But, according to Archimedes' principle, a floating object displaces its own weight and nothing more. Since people are less dense than quicksand, they'll never go completely under. They will naturally sink until they are around waist-deep.

Continued or panicked movement, however, may cause a person to sink further in the quicksand. Since this increasingly impairs movement, it can lead to a situation where other factors such as exposure, drowning in a rising tide, or attacks by predatory or otherwise aggressive animals may harm a trapped person.

Quicksand may be escaped by slow movement of the legs in order to increase the viscosity of the fluid, and rotation of the body so as to float in a horizontal position lying face up. You can watch that how to video HERE.

Quicksand is a trope of adventure fiction, particularly in film. According to a 2010 article by Slate, this gimmick had its heyday in the 1960s, when almost 3% of all films showed characters sinking in clay, mud or sand.

By the 1980s the quicksand scene had lost favour, probably due to a greater understanding of the science.

There's an episode of the show MythBusters from 2004 in which Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the professional debunkers, fill an enormous canister with almost 10,000 kilograms of fine sand, and then turn it into a squishy, sinking slurry by pumping water up through the bottom. Adam climbs in, wearing a pith helmet, and starts sinking … but only to his chest. Killer quicksand myth busted! Watch HERE.

Quicksand may be gone from the mainstream, but there's are still places where it exerts its legendary pull, and that is on the Internet. There is a surprising large online community of quicksand enthusiasts … kindred spirits, some of whom are "sinkers”, i.e. those who crave the sensation of being mired in deep mud, the suction that's created when you step into water-logged clay. Try going down that worm hole for a while HERE.

And there is also Studio 588, a producer of soft porn in the form of videos that invariably involve a scantily clad woman getting trapped in quicksand. If you really must, check that out HERE.

Finally, the makers of QUICKSAND a 2023 film obviously didn’t get the memo. Just about the entire movie is set in a mud puddle within which the hero and heroine are buried up to their necks. That trailer HERE.
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References

wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksand
nature.com/articles/news050926-9
slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/08/terra_infirma
anthonybalducci.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-quicksand-chronicles
studio588qs.com
quicksandvisuals.com/nsqs
freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2021/10/24/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-again-of-quicksand

Images

1. Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. / Patrick O'Neill Riley
2. Divorce Italian Style, 1961
3. Near Albany, South Western Australia. Credit: Mickie Quick.
4. Video: How to escape quicksand, 2017, Insider Tech
5. Quicksand in the movies
6. Assisted by local tribesmen, Tarzan (played by Johnny Weissmuller) saves a distressed female from quicksand.
7. Gilligan's Island, S10 E10, 1964
8. Tarzan's Greatest Adventure, 1959
9. Get Smart, Schwartz Island, 1968
10. Video: Mythbusters: Quicksand, 2004
11. It’s late, Studio 588. Synopsis: "Taylor and Dark Dementia finally arrive at Studio 588, as models for a quicksand shoot. They are, however, extremely late and no one is around. Foolishly they try to explore."
12. Video: QUICKSAND Official Trailer, 2023