The idea is to stay calm (which might be easier said than done), lean back and spread out to spread your weight more evenly and wait until you float back up to the surface. To survive a fall into dry quicksand, you need outside help as quickly as possible, but what if you find yourself in some wet quicksand, not drowning, but stuck? You need to wiggle your leg a little in order to introduce water to the sand around your feet to liquefy the sand again. Then as they sucked the grain out with an industrial vacuum, the grain couldn’t fall more tightly around him, and he survived. They lowered a cylinder over the man’s body. The firefighters did come up with a clever solution, though. But soon he was experiencing agonising chest pain and the doctor developed an asthma attack brought on by the dust. Each time he exhaled, the volume of his chest reduced, causing grain to rush to fill the gap and making it progressively harder for him to breathe.Ī doctor was lowered down on a rope to give him oxygen and a harness was placed around the man’s chest. By the time the firefighters were able to establish which of eight tanks he was in, the grain was up to his armpits and acting according to the classic idea of quicksand, was dragging him down. In 2002 a case report was published telling the tale of a man who fell into a grain store late one evening on a farm in Germany. It is true that struggling can make you sink in further, but would you actually sink far enough to drown?

The friction between the sand particles is much-reduced, meaning it can’t support your weight anymore and at first you do sink. But then the water and sand separate, leaving a layer of densely packed wet sand which can trap it. The ground looks solid, but when you step on it the sand begins to liquefy. Quicksand usually consists of sand or clay and salt that’s become waterlogged, often in river deltas. Yet the evidence that the more you struggle, the further you sink until you drown, is rather lacking. They were in everything from Lawrence of Arabia to The Monkees. In the 1960s, one in 35 films featured quicksands. There are so many films featuring death by quicksand that Slate journalist Daniel Engbar has even tracked the peak quicksand years in film. All that’s left is sinister sand, and maybe his hat. A man is caught in quicksand, begging onlookers for help, but the more he struggles, the further down into the sand he is sucked until eventually he disappears.

Dry quicksand