Some Practical Advice for Your Weekend
Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.
Like many great tomes of history, Be Amazing is largely meant to be read as allegory. You (hopefully) can't inject the gooey center of yourself into your neighbor and take over his brain, but you can take the story of the sacculina as a parable showing you how mooching should be done.There are, however, a few entries that offer more immediate, real-world-useful information. This is one of them.
How to Crawl out of Quicksand
Bad Idea: Trust the Movies
Do this, and you're liable to end up thinking that quicksand is something that only happens in the jungle or the desert, and that the average patch has no discernible bottom. But quicksand, as it turns out, isn't some Lovecraftian entity come to devour human souls. It's really just your average run-of-the-mill sand and clay that's been saturated with water, usually from an underground spring. Technically, you don't even need sand--any old find-grained soil will do. According to the United States Geological Survey, quicksand can pop up just about anywhere. It could be waiting for you, right now, out in the backyard. On the plus side, though, that stuff about it being bottomless is also bunk. Most patches of quicksand would barely reach reach up to your waist, let alone be deep enough to cover your head. So before you start screaming for help, it might be a good idea to just try standing up. Unless, you know, you like being made fun of by emergency response crews.
Good Idea: Know Your Physics
Getting unstuck from quicksand is really a Vulcan-esque endeavor, requiring rationality, intelligence and emotional distance. Unfortunately, the most common response to sinking thigh-deep into what previously appeared to be solid ground is to freak out like Captain Kirk at an intergalactic bikini contest. You must stay cool. This information should help. In 2005, researchers from the University of Amsterdam announced the results of their research on quicksand. According to their report in Nature, the human body is actually much less dense than quicksand. Meaning that, under normal circumstances, a person in quicksand should really just bob around like buoy on the ocean. No heroic effort required. Problems only set in when you struggle, which stirs up the sand and water mixture, making it more liquid and you more likely to sink. But, while surviving the pit is easy, getting out is another story. Because quicksand is so viscous, it's difficult for air to penetrate it. Thus, when you move your arm or leg, air can't fill the spot where you once were and a partial vacuum forms. This makes it extremely difficult to pull yourself out of quicksand, even if you are moving slowly and deliberately. In fact, one of the true dangers of quicksand is exhaustion. Even removing one leg from the muck might make a lone hiker too tired to get back to camp and could open them up to attacks from wild animals or the perils of bad weather. Quicksand: It's a good reason to do things with friends.
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Your posts are great, Maggie. Keep up the good work.
It's been said before by someone more perceptive than me, but I recall there being a glut of quicksand references in the 80s. Most prime time TV shows had some sort of encounter with the stuff. You would have thought it was an epidemic.
Hm... I don't know about the "Bad Idea to Trust Movies" part. Aside from "the Mummy" I think movies are somewhat realistic about quicksand. Take Blazing Saddles for example: The two characters in the beginning of the movie get stuck in quicksand and slowly begin to sink with their cart. They then stand relatively still and stay calm until they hit the bottom and slowly walk out, emerging exhausted.
So that to me seems like a rather realistic depiction of quicksand... oh and don't bring The Princes Bride, that as we all know was "lightning sand", a different phenomenon all together.
Tidal areas in the UK claim a dozen or so lives every year, the 'sand banks' where people go to pick seashells of various kinds are halfway to a liquid, but look 'solid'. New victims every year, sadly.
Interesting, but you never actually say how one can get out of quicksand. If simply pulling your leg out is exhausting, it goes without saying that if you were in it up to your waist, you'd already be screwed.
Sounds like the plan is to not struggle and hope someone comes and finds you.
The Mythbusters covered this very well, one of my favorite episodes. I'd always wondered about quicksand- is it real, how do you really escape it. I still don't believe it really exists. Has anyone ever known anyone who has encountered it, or even seen it on some documentary TV show? I've seen volcanoes, tornadoes, sharks, even rare lifeforms that only grow around deep sea vents, but never believable, good sinky-sand.
I actually got my leg up to my knee stuck in some honest-to-God quicksand when I slipped off my kayak trying to park on the side of a river of the north coast of Kauai. Fortunately, I realized the problem fairly quickly, so didn't make it much worse. Still took me about 15-20 minutes of serious effort to get it out. I declined to go back in for my shoe. Getting the boat back to the rental place was a serious drag after that.
If I recall correctly an episode of Mythbusters debunked the whole idea of quicksand.
Something about the density of the human body being about the same as water. Since quicksand is water+sand it has a higher density than water ergo the human body; and therefore a human floats on quicksand like a cork in a bathtub (or a cannonball in mercury if you prefer).
Quicksand does clearly claim its fair share of shoes.
That said, I think it is much better described as fluid mud. As there is often nothing quick or sandy about it. And fluid mud is everywhere while quick sand is only really in video games and old movies. Deep wet snow is pretty much the same thing too.
I think we should all carry a bullwhip with us in case we need to lasso a tree and pull ourselves free of the suction.
It's quick in the sense of alive or living like in 'cut to the quick' or quicksilver.
FWIW
Around age 8, my brother frequently went to a friend's ranch to play in the quicksand. Guess my mother wasn't the overly protective sort. "Mom, Mikey and I are going swimming in the quicksand." "Ok, are you staying for diner?"
I think the Mythbusters were disproving simply that people sink to the bottom of quicksand.
Quicksand definitely exists, but rather than suck you under like in bad movies, it simply holds onto you while the rising tide, predators or exposure do you in.
I remember a heart-breaking news story about a newlywed woman in Girdwood, Alaska, trapped up to her waist in the mud at the edge of the ocean with a quickly rising tide. Even with her husband, and eventually a rescue team, trying to free her over several hours, she was unable to escape and drowned.
Captain Kirk would not "freak out" at an intergalactic bikini contest. Rather, he would get his freak on.
The way to get out of quicksand is this:
one) if you are wearing a backpack or anything heavy, let it go. The weight can kill you.
two) relax and slowly lean backwards to float on your back like you learned in the pool when you were five
three) skim the top of the water with your arms and hands to move to the edge of the pit
four)buy a new backpack with built in inflatables to prevent losing your stuff again :)
I've been in quicksand. I got out, but my shoes didn't. Lying on your back and wriggling away works. It seems like it's easier to get your legs out once you're barefoot. If you were wearing shoes or boots that you couldn't squirm out of, it could be ugly.
I've been in quicksand, but it was a small patch, about up to my knees. It was near the base of Mt. St. Helens, by a stream. My brother and I played in it, jumping in. It was cool.
When I was young (about 20 or so years ago) some of us neighborhood kids and our dads would go clamming out on the sand bars that were exposed during low tide. One of my friends got caught in quicksand. The dads tried to dig him out, but that just made the kid sink in more. He was definitely up to his thighs the last I saw him. Mainly us kids just laughed at him and found his situation comical. Eventually one dad shuttled the rest of us kids off to shore while the rest of the dads stayed behind to help our trapped friend.
Many hours later, our fathers all came back utterly exhausted with our friend wrapped in blankets. He didn't speak for the rest of the trip and was obviously severely traumatized.
Years later my dad said that all the dads were fairly convinced they weren't going to be able to get our friend out before the tide came in and drowned him. He said, as it was, they barely got him out in time. Our fathers were all fairly certain his death was inevitable after the first few hours of attempting to get him out proved utterly futile and they shipped us off so that we kids wouldn't witness our friend dying.
It really screwed with the heads of many of the parents in the neighborhood. I know it still haunts my dad 20+ years later. We never went clamming again after that.
I encountered quicksand in the wilds of Northeast Ohio (really!) when I was at a science camp for geeky 6th graders. It is very buoyant if you float and the teacher told us to slowly do the backstroke if we were stuck. The whole thing was a blast until a log in the quicksand rolled over and trapped my leg, then it was less-than-wonderful until I remembered the 'do things slow' part. You can also usually find a log or something to climb onto and sort of slowly kick your way out of it.
I think that the shows that went crazy for quicksand in the 80s probably did it because someone made a decent fake quicksand pit on a backlot and it was exciting until it became a cliche.
I've been in quicksand many times... there are many types: Red River quicksand is a thick, really sucking type that can tire you out fast, and does require slow, steady motions to escape (I was chest deep). Texas quicksand around Lake Lewisville will go from solid to liquid in about 3 seconds, so you sink fast! Not much suction, everyone laughs and you have to crawl out. Kauai has some less deep quicksand but the Alakai Swamp trail has bogs that are like thick soup - one step and blup! Shoulder deep in muck. You float in all of these and can swim out. The only time I was really stuck and thought I might not get free was in Texas, along a small drainage stream. Sand had washed in and it was spongey. I sank knee deep in about 5-6 seconds and thought "No big deal" then as I struggled a bit (barefoot) it sank slowly to hip-deep...then I remember feeling it start to solidify, and saw water gushing up from the sand around me. I tried like mad to get a leg out but in less than 5 seconds it became ass solid as cement! Except you could dig it, but as you did the surrounding sand would have water seep into it, it would turn into a thick cement like blob and fill n where you had dug. I could only get each leg up 1/4 inch with about 15 seconds worth of struggle... so it took me 45-60 minutes of really really hard work to get free... a snake (non-poisonous) swam up to about 3 feet away and knew I was stuck and no threat. THAT was scary!
Mud and clay are actually harder to get out of... real sucking clay grabs a hold and barefoot or not, you are in for a struggle! General rules: it WON'T suck you under, it IS real, it is RARELY more than knee to hip deep, and if runny, it's funny and easy to get out of, if thick, get out of the shoes (barefoot any you can't get stuck forever - with shoes or boots, you're screwed) and deep mud is in most cases the hardest to get out of!