Greetings from Coba Point on the Lower Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. I’m here getting our shack ready for the completion of its sale next week. It’s remote, and the uploading situation is not great. So, I’m not having much luck getting this week’s podcast posted. I’ll post it when I get back to Bondi on Sunday. Anyway, one of the things that I chatted about with my co-host Claudia this week was quicksand. And so, in lieu of the actual podcast, here’s a deep dive (so to speak) into quicksand.
Remo
Whatever happened to death by quicksand?
Quicksand once offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement. It was a plot device unburdened by character or narrative. 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 what’s called a “colloid” consisting of fine granular material (such as sand, silt or clay) and water. When the water 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. [Ed: Phew!]
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. Check out the first video below.
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!
Quicksand may be gone from the mainstream, but there are still places where it exerts its legendary pull, and that is on the internet. There is a surprisingly 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, and the suction that’s created when you step into waterlogged clay. Try going down that worm hole for a while.
And there is also Studio 588, a producer of soft porn videos that invariably involve a scantily clad woman getting trapped in quicksand. If you really must, check that out too. [Ed: Claudia, my podcasting co-host, was somewhat horrified to learn of this.]
Finally, the makers of QUICKSAND, a 2023 film 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.
Videos
REMORANDOM Book Chapter
