If you’ve driven your car into quicksand, you cannot pull the car out using other vehicles. And the cowboy actually dying from having the rope around his waist,” he says.ĭaniel doesn’t know how true those stories are, but it’s a good urban legend and a cautionary tale of what can happen if you try. “There are all kinds of stories about cowboys lassoing their rope around their horse and the horse, trying to pull them out. This could severely injure you because of the sheer force needed to remove you. Or get your friends to tie a rope around you and use their truck to pull you out.

You can slowly lift your legs back up to the surface and gently paddle out, as demonstrated in this Australian Academy of Science video.ĭon’t take guidance from Hollywood and get a cowboy to lasso you with a rope and use their horse to pull you out. Instead, rotate your legs in slow, small movements to reintroduce water between the sand and your legs.

We are not as dense as quicksand, so we will only ever sink partway like a rubber ducky in a tub. What Daniel found is that we can never drown in quicksand. Thankfully, our iconic devil didn’t sink beneath the quicksand, never to be seen again.Īs quirky as this experiment sounds, it has real-life applications. He collected samples of quicksand in Iran and analysed what it was made from – mix of fine sand, saltwater and clay.ĭaniel then used beads and other items, including (bizarrely) a Tassie devil figurine with similar densities to humans, to check whether they would ‘drown’ in the quicksand he re-created in the lab. This was a question Dr Daniel Bonn, Professor of Physics at the University of Amsterdam, was determined to answer. Is this fear warranted? Can you really drown in quicksand? Perhaps the fear of quicksand engendered in many of us is compounded by a snake being used to pull Indiana Jones out of quicksand in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.Īlthough quicksand is no longer a go-to for films, fear around it remains.

Women sinking in quicksand