Stuff You Should Know - Can quicksand kill you?

Episode Date: June 24, 2010

In many films, hapless characters meet their untimely demise in a lethal pit of quicksand. It's a gruesome, undignified end -- but is it realistic? Josh and Chuck tackle the properties of quicksand -- and how to escape it -- in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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See terms and learn more at discover.com slash online privacy protection. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. From HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W. Bryant. Chuck Bryant. You pointed at me as if I was supposed to say hey and welcome to the podcast. Anna. I almost did. I was like. The trick is to point and start talking at almost the same time. There needs to be like a maybe 8 or 10 millisecond delay.

All right. All you journalism school students, broadcasting tips from Josh. Throw everybody off of their game. It's good. Point and speak. Like you know what I just did? I just assumed domination of this podcast. The whole thing.

Well you do that every time. That's not true. So Chuck, have you ever seen Gilligan's Island? Yeah. A bunch of times. Did you know that by my estimate, Gilligan's Island holds the record for most number of episodes used by a television show featuring quicksand as a device. I've got five.

Five. Yeah. Me too. Gilligan got caught. Skipper got caught. Mr. Howell faked his death. Remember that one? No.

What did you just put the hat on top of some quicksand? Yeah. That's exactly what he did. I do remember that. He changed his will to include the castaways and he thought they were trying to kill him. So he ran away and faked his death. But they were really just planning a party for him. I'll bet.

And then botanist Lord Beasley, who was one of their random guests that they had. I don't remember him. I don't either. And Ginger and Maryanne apparently got caught one night. That's some sexy quicksand. I'll bet it is. Yeah. So I don't think there's anybody out there who's unfamiliar with quicksand.

It's just such a great little throw to anytime. There's a jungle scene or something and things are getting boring. And you're a writer and it's 1957 or 1968 or 1985. You say quicksand. Yeah. You don't see it a lot lately in films and TV though. We've gotten slightly more sophisticated. I think people realize that was not really a big thing.

I don't think it's just with quicksand. I think we have gotten generally more sophisticated. In the 80s, who were pretty much throughout the whole decade, the biggest box office straws. Oh, Arnold Schwarzenegger maybe. Yeah. Sylvester Stallone. Sure. Yeah.

John Claude Van Damme. Not a very thinking decade, right? Yeah. Good point. Then you move into the 90s and you have more guys like Edward Norton. RDJ. Whoever that is. Robert Tony Jr.

Right. Yeah. What he's very heartened to see is making quite a comeback. Well. He's gotten off of the black tar and into life. And into box office cold. Yeah. Have you seen Sherlock Holmes?

No. I haven't seen that movie like eight times. Are we ever going to talk about quicksand? So quicksand Chuck, can it kill you? I saw a thing that said theoretically if you were stuck over your head and you couldn't get out, obviously you could drown in it, but I believe you have a scientific study to refute that. There was a study and we found from researching, reading an article on the site and just kind of looking around.

There's a very finite amount of information out there on quicksand because there's just a finite amount to know about quicksand. It's not as exciting as it is in the movies. I'll say that. Which explains my Robert Downey Jr. Tyrate. Right. There was a 2005 study that pretty much put the period on the sentence about quicksand

and said it's physically impossible for a human being to sink into a pit of quicksand and die. Okay. Sure. I think this, what I suppose was if you were like dropped on your head into the quicksand. Yes. But it's usually not even so deep as to be taller than a human. No.

But if you're just a guy, if it's just you or I, and you go into a, you fall into a pit of quicksand that is say seven feet deep, which is exceedingly rare. Sure. Right? Most of the time it's much shallower than that. Right. So you just stand up. Yeah.

Right? We are less dense than quicksand. The density of the human body is about one gram per cubic centimeter or about one gram per milliliter of water. Okay. Right? Quicksand is about twice that. So if you just sit there, you become buoyant.

Yeah. You float on water and quicksand is denser than water, so you'll definitely float on the quicksand. Exactly. So you can't sink. Are we done? We could be. But let's talk about sand and the properties of quicksand, which by the way is falls under

the purview of a field of science called rheology. Really? It's the study of, basically, it's the study of the flow and deformation of unusual things like mayonnaise or silly putty or quicksand. Seriously. Right. So rheology studies quicksand, foam, things like that. Things that like mayonnaise, when you carve some mayonnaise out with a knife, it doesn't

go back to a flat surface like it should, but it's still liquid, technically. It should have flow, doesn't. Yeah. Reology. I love mayo. A mayo man, Josh. Quicksand is, if we want to define it, it's solid ground, actually. It's not like the oatmeal.

I tried to find out what they used in movies and the closest I could find was Fuller's Earth, like mixed with water, you ever heard of Fuller's Earth? This is really, really powdery dirt, light brown, and used a lot on film sets for all sorts of stuff, but that's what I think it is, anyway. It looks like oatmeal to me. But in reality, it's solid ground and it's just liquefied solid Earth because it's been super saturated. Yeah.

And there's generally two ways that it can occur, right? Yeah. There is the upward movement of water, say from a spring, or an earthquake can kind of loosen it, and then you couple that with the introduction of water. Yeah. Bam. Quicksand. Not too far from a sinkhole, in some ways.

No. Not too far at all, frankly. We've been on a geology kick lately, haven't we? I know. I was thinking that we're kind of completing an Earth Sciences module here. This is our elementary school science project. Exactly, yeah. So that's pretty much the two ways that Quicksand can form, and especially with one, say, where

you have an upward movement. Right. All right. Let's talk about sand in general. Okay. Dry sand. Yes. You're walking along the beach.

You're getting friction from the ground, which is why you're not falling down, right? Sand has something that's called a friction chain, I believe. And that means that the force that you're putting on it is distributed across the particles, so it forms a solid layer, a solid resistance, right? With Quicksand, water molecules have been introduced in enough... They're agitated, right? Well, you don't even need to agitate it. If you can get water in there, say, through a spring, floating upward, the water molecules

are forming basically little pockets around the sand particles. They're not connected by friction any longer, right? So they're not solid, they're not stable. Then, if you add some sort of movement, say, an earthquake or the force of somebody's foot going on it, then that whole whatever friction there is that keeps it stable is lost. Right. So, like, you've been to the beach, right?

Remember when you were a kid and you've never been to the beach? I've been to the beach with you, my friend, San Diego. That's right. Although we didn't, you know, frolic or anything. No, it's kind of cold. There's no time. It's December. No time for frolicing, unfortunately.

But you remember, like, when you were a kid, let's say you would walk into where the water is coming up and then receding, and you would start to sink a little bit, and then your feet would kind of, you know, if you let yourself go, your feet would become stuck. Right. And I remember being a kid and thinking, wow, that's kind of frightening, because they would really become locked in if you get up to, let's say, your ankle. And that's kind of just the same principle, right? Right.

That's the exact same principle. It's the same thing with, like, wet concrete, too. When your foot, say, your foot or your leg goes in there and is occupying space, you're creating this density, which, I guess, creates some sort of suction force, like a vacuum. Yeah, vacuum. Which makes it very difficult to pull out. That 2005 study in nature concluded that to pull your foot out of quicksand at a rate of one centimeter a second, which is fairly moderate, I think I can do that.

That looks like one centimeter a second, doesn't it? Yeah, sure. But to do that when it's stuck in quicksand requires the equivalent amount of force that it would take to lift a medium-sized car. So like, only Chuck Norris could probably do that? Chuck Norris and only Chuck Norris. Right. Definitely not Jean-Claude Bendo.

It's crazy. Right. So you don't want to try to move your feet at, you know, a centimeter a second. You want to slowly move them, and you want to wriggle them from what I understand. Wriggle. You want to wriggle, actually, because what you're doing is you're very slowly creating space, pockets around your legs, which are stuck. That allows the water to come in, which allows it to break out the sand sediment.

So are you talking about how to actually get out of quicksand? It feels like that's what we just moved into. Yeah. I mean, that's the one part that I found is similar to the movies. Everything else is kind of really just a movie type of thing, but it is true. They say the more you move and struggle, the more you will sink. Just like regular water, though. If you were drowning, they say the same thing.

If you were drowning and you actually calmed down, you would float. But your constant thrashing about will pull you under. Right. And it creates a stronger vacuum, basically, the more you move. Have you seen that man versus wild segment where he's in quicksand? No. So the guy gets into a thing of quicksand, real life quicksand, and shows you how to get out.

Really? Have your cameraman hint you a rope? That was another thing, too, from that study in nature. Again, this thing is like, you know, you don't need to do it. It's been done. No other study needs to be done in quicksand. But they said, one of the authors said, don't ask your friends to pull you out, say with the vine.

Well, that's what they always do in the movies. I know. It could considerably pull you in half. Wow. Yeah. Really? Yeah. One of the authors of that study, that rheology study, said, you don't want to do that.

What did Bear Grylls do? He slowly wriggled his way out, right? Oh, OK. And the weird thing is, it's just the oddest thing I would recommend everybody like, I'm sure Discovery has it. We probably have it. Sure. We've got it on YouTube, but Bear and quicksand or something like that.

He's in this, it looks like a beach. You know how the beach looks at like, kind of medium tide or something? So it's like, there's the sand, but then there's this thin layer of water over it. Yeah. Just kind of floating on the top. He's in that. And he's up to about his waist in quicksand. And he's pulling himself out.

So he's got his elbow up on the very quicksand that the rest of his body is in. But it's resting on top of it almost. It looks really odd. I might have seen that actually. It's pretty cool. But he slowly pulls out. And what you want to do is get into a supine position on your back because you're just going to float.

Because again, you're less dense than quicksand. Good point. Obviously, you're going to find quicksand and you can find it anywhere if the conditions are right. Generally, you're going to find it more around like marshes and rivers, oceans, where there's groundwater, that kind of thing. And if you are hapless enough to get caught in quicksand along a beach on a shore, you're going to want to get out of there very slowly, but surely because eventually the tide's going

to come in and you're in big trouble, especially if you've seen Creepshow. You know what happens to Ted Danson. Buried up to his head, wouldn't he? By Leslie Nielsen. That's right. And that was no naked gun joke. That was the real deal. It really was.

What else we got? Well, dry quicksand. You sent that article to me? Yeah. That article was written by our buddy, Alan Bellows, who we've actually never met and don't know. But I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. He's over at Damn Interesting.

I think he's the founder. Oh, really? Yeah. And he wrote an article on quicksand and was talking about, like you said, dry quicksand, right? Yeah. And this is not anything that they've observed in nature, but they have created this in a lab, right?

Where I think the sand is sort of like a house of cards. It's so loose that it barely can hold its own weight. Right. It's like kind of, I think it was, say you had sand kicked up by a dust storm. And then when it's deposited again, if it's deposited theoretically, because like you said, it's never been proven to exist outside of the lab. But theoretically, if it was deep enough, it could look like it was solid. Right.

And for all intents and purposes, it was stable until you walk on it. The problem is if it's deeper than you are tall, there's nothing, there's no water to make you buoyant. You're gone. It will kill you. It will swallow you whole. And yeah, it's like, so when you go down, it puffs up some sand, right? Yeah.

It's like the movie Dune or something, like you would be swallowed into the very sand. Frank Herbert, quite a visionary. Yeah. Yeah. But that's folklore as far as we know, although it has been, like you said, done in the lab. And there's a cool, there's a cool like series of photos of, it looks like an apple on top of some dry, quick sand. Oh yeah.

Sucked under. I saw that. And if you look at the time, a lap, it's like seven hundredths of a second. Wow. Or maybe seven tenths of a second. Almost like a sinkhole. Yes. Again.

Geology special. Yes. What should we do next? Like crystals? Yeah. Okay. We'll do crystal skulls. Caves and crystal skulls.

Should we talk a little bit more about the movies and TV? I think we should. Again. You got anything else? Not a lot about quick sand. It almost sounds conciliatory. Like, I'm sorry we did this one. Josh Blazing Saddles, of course.

I always mention one of my favorite films had a quick sand scene early on. Very funny. There was a movie in 1967. Actually we should point out we got all these from quicksandmovies.net and they, I think literally have every reference of quick sand ever in film and TV history. It's your one stop shop for quick sand movie reference. So I just plucked a few interesting ones that were relevant to us. Well, actually this one isn't relevant to us, but the rest are.

There was one movie called The Acid Eaters, aka The Acid People from 1967. More average middle class couples become weakened hippies, riding motorcycles, frolicking nude and having a climactic, I can't say that word, adult party on a large white pyramid of LSD. During a topless cat fight, a woman is thrown into the quick sand up to her bare chest as several bad actors stand around and watch. The next shot is just her arm above the surface giving everyone the finger. You gotta check that out. Sounds like a classic.

We talked a little bit about TV, it's been in one episode of MacGyver, three episodes of Benny Hill, three G.I. Joe cartoons, three episodes of Dynasty, four episodes of Fantasy Island, of course I knew that would have been a little higher. I love this one. Four episodes of General Hospital. Has it really? Yeah. I just hope she said in a hospital had four quick sand incidences.

Right. No, I think I saw one back in like 81 or 82 when Luke and Laura were trapped on some island or something. Yeah, there's always like an island scenario and a soap opera. And there's always quick sand when there's an island. Of course. Magnum PI, you want to talk about this one? I want you to.

The show was called Operation Silent Night from 1980. The guys were stranded on a barren island at Christmas because the helicopter broke. And that's just a barren island, a barren island that's being used for naval bombing exercises. That's right. It's very tense. During palm fronds, Rick walks into a mud bog, thinks it's quick sand, and he sinks up to his chin before the guys tell him to stand up and get out.

Yeah. And if you ever do fall in a quick sand, keep calm. If you're with your friends, make sure that you've hit the bottom. I've actually done this before. What you're just describing happened to Rick happened to me. And it's terrifying. I'm not kidding. Really?

It's terrifying. I was screeching like, help, get me out, right? And I realized that my feet were on solid ground. Right. I'm not kidding. It really happened. I believe it. Okay.

Thank you. And it's very scary. But once you realize you have your footing, it's very relieving. But if you can kind of keep the fainter going, afterward, you just stop, hold out your hands and go, ta-da. And hippy rob will say, oh man, that was a close one. Actually it wasn't hippy rob. It was another hippy friend, Justin, who is there.

It'd be Justin. Yeah. He can attest to it. I guess we'll close out with three episodes of The Simpsons. Let's. Mole man was in quick sand at one point. The cat of The Simpsons, I think, there was a water leak or something and then the litter acted as quick sand and sucked the cat into it.

I don't remember that. And then, of course, the scene where the episode where Margin Homer went to a spa, Homer's getting massaged by the woman and she's walking on his back and she starts sinking into his back fat. He tells her not to struggle. Yeah. He'll only sink faster. So there you go.

That's it. That is quick sand done and done. If you want to see a pretty cool flash animation of some guy in sleeveless t-shirt sinking in quick sand and if you want to read the only article on how stuff works that explicitly cites the worst case scenario handbook, just type quick sand, one word into the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com. Again, check out Dan Interesting's article. It's very cool.

And if you can find anything about rheology, check it out. It's pretty interesting stuff, right? You know, I knew a guy in LA that knew the dude that wrote those books, the worst case scenario books. We have a fan who wrote a zombie survival handbook. Did you ever read that? I did. It is excellent.

It is way excellent. I love that book. I read it from cover to cover, Chuck. Really? First time ever. So go ahead. Oh, yeah, which means it's time for Listener Mail. I acted like I couldn't go forward.

Actually, Josh and Lou have listened to our mail this week. This is going to be fun. Today on Facebook, with your permission, I said, you know what, Listener Mail is getting a little dry, so why don't we just take some questions from the Facebook fans and we'll answer like 10 quick ones on the air and I'll highlight some for you. And we got like 180 questions inside an hour. Are we just doing like, what's it that many, 180 in an hour? And climbing.

I had to cut it off. Are we just reading their first names or first and last? I would say just first. But what about the privacy settings on Facebook? Renee says, do you discuss what points you'll cover ahead of time or does it happen more organically? And as most people know, we kind of don't prep that much with each other at all. We just do our research and then we come in and we have our first conversation right

here. Okay. Today we broke protocol with me sending Chuck that damn interesting article that's about as close as we come to really sharing information. We're very, we jealously guard our own research, don't we? If it feels spontaneous and conversational, it's because it is. Okay. You ready?

Yeah. I got one. This is from Nick. If one of you couldn't make a recording and the oat hair had to choose a replacement dash, who would be your fantasy recording partner? Yeah, I can't never record with anyone else, but you. That was very sweet. I'll say the same thing.

Yeah. I'll say you up there. Nicholas says, how does Josh get prepared when he writes an article and how do you manage to remember all the names when you're recording? That's for you. All the names when we're recording, what do you mean? Well, how do you get prepared when you write an article and how do you remember all this junk that we say?

Oh, I have found that my brain is a lot more sponge-like than I ever realized before. Sometimes you've seen it. I'll just be sitting there spouting stuff off and I'll like give you this look, like can you believe that I'm not looking at a piece of paper right now? Yeah. It's awesome. To get prepared, I drink two raw eggs out of a glass. Yeah.

Rocky style. Uh-huh. And then I find that I podcast best at my most relaxed when I'm pantsless as I am right now. Tony, to Jerry, if Josh and Chuck were trapped in a burning building and you only had time to save one of them before it collapsed and killed the other, who would you save? And here's Jerry's response to that. Oh, Jerry, that was so nice.

Thank you for saying that. I have one. This one's from Anna. Where did you each go to college and what were your majors? Chuck, I know where you went to college. We went to the same college. We did. UGA, University of Georgia.

Yes, go, dogs. How are we looking this year? Are we going to have a decent football team? You can never tell. Fingers crossed. I'm an English major here. I think you were too, right? No.

History and I minored in anthropology. I knew that. Why did you say that? So there you have it. Jessica Crouch, a Facebook fan and a looker. She says, what's our biggest pet peeve? I think mine is the cell phone, loud cell phone, talkers in public. I'm not into that.

Biggest pet peeve. I would say, jeez, I have so many of them. I'll just grab one out of thin air. People who misspell there, depending on the context. Good one. That's just so dumb, but I guess all pet peeves are dumb, aren't they? Yeah. Couple more.

Sure. Nicky says, any podcasts that you're both itching to do but haven't plucked up the courage to do yet? Yes. Furries and parapherias. Chuck. Scientology. Nice.

I don't want to get rubbed out. Where did Josh go to high school from Bob, the Toledo dude? I actually went to Sprayberry High School in beautiful Marietta, Georgia, but I went to junior high school in Toledo at Burndale Junior High, again, the Bulldogs. I have a Bulldogs theme going through my educational history. Becca says, think of someone close to you who has passed away if you had a chance to spend one more hour with them, but it would cost you a year of your life, would you, and who?

And I would absolutely shave a year off of my old life to hang out with my granddad, like as an adult. Wow. Because he was a cool dude and he died when I was like 14, so I didn't get a chance to like talk to him about good adult stuff. That is very neat. Very neat, Chuck. I have one for you.

Matt Ramsey has a question for you, Chuck. I imagine it's not for me because I don't have a, well, you don't want to be in my basement. Too many, too many horrible acts have been committed down there. Can my band come open up for your band in your basement, Chuck? Sure, man. Yeah? That'd be awesome. Matt, you send an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com.

I'll give you directions as Chuck's house. My dog will be very excited to have someone else down there playing. I've got another one. All right. Noel says, what is the difference between a cream soup and a chowder? Can I answer this one? Yeah. So, Chuck, it's really actually all geography.

Yeah, that's what I hear. The French word for pot evolved into chowder, chadron, chowdron. Or cauldron, maybe? Maybe. Later. Yeah. And that's the only difference. There's no cooking difference.

There's no ingredient difference. That's what I've heard. It's all just really okay. If you're a New England, it's a chowder. Yeah. If you're elsewhere, it's a cream soup. Yeah. All right.

That's it for those, but we've got another batch coming on the next podcast. The next one? Yeah, the one we record right after this one. Oh, really, do we? Yeah. Okay, all right. Well, thank you, everybody, for asking your questions. If you want to pose us a question or say hi or whatever you want to do, join us on Facebook.

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