Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:01 Today we are recording remotely. I am in the blanket Fort and Amy is over at Gonzaga. Yes. Rain junk is a special guest in the Gonzaga digital humanities initiative podcast lab today. So that is exciting. And we are practicing extreme social distancing. We didn't want to do six. That doesn't seem far enough apart. Nope. What about five miles do you think for something like that? Yeah, we're extremely cautious and prudent. So you know, we've washed our hands, we've cleaned our microphones. Yeah, we're pro social distances. Yes we are. All right, well let's get started. Welcome to brain junk. I'm trace Kerr and I'm a Barton and this is a brainstorm.
Speaker 1 00:53 All right. You guys know I'm on social media a lot and there has been a meme floating around that says something like, I thought that quicksand would play a much bigger role in my adult life as a child. That's so true. In Western movies. It's an adventure movies. Uh, the princess bride has a notable quicksand scene and uh, so as adults I have never encountered
Speaker 0 01:17 have you? No, I haven't. And I always think of that princess bride scene and I agree with you. I, you know, it was like, okay, you got to have your arms out and you got to have a stick and I'm going to be ready. And, and I have experienced like sucking sand at the ocean when the tide has been out, but not like I'm walking in the woods and I am going to die.
Speaker 1 01:40 Yes. Well I wanted to talk about that today. Can you really die in quicksand? Can you really be sucked under is what I wanted to know. Are you going to be lost to everyone by getting sucked under the quicksand? And I'm happy to report that. I would like to give a qualified no, you will not get sucked under by the quicksand. The person who really did the definitive research on this is Daniel Bond of the university of Amsterdam and he was on a trip in Iran at NAMIC Lake and saw quicksand signs and he was really interested, like really? Whoa. So he took a sample and I'm curious about his sample size because I'm wondering how he traveled from Iran to Amsterdam and like did he take a bucket? I dunno. The uh, what I read didn't stress sample size, but he took quicksand back to Amsterdam so that, uh, they could study it.
Speaker 1 02:32 And what they found, um, he and his team was that the composition of the quicksand, first of all is like, well, what is it? How would it do this? It's fine. Sand clay, saltwater. That's how it becomes quick sand. And what they did to test to see can it really suck a person and how does this work? They got aluminum beads that were the same density as an average human and they plunked them down on top of the quicksand and then they shook the quicksand. But you know, to, to get it to simulate the motion of a human on there. Right. And it did indeed start sucking the beads down so people do get sucked in, but it would not suck them in all the way. Because what he basically found is that the sand and the quicksand with the water in it and the salt, it's more dense than people are.
Speaker 1 03:18 So we're going to Bob to the top eventually. So you reach a point where there's some sort of equilibrium and you just can't go in any farther. You get about halfway, even if you jiggle and wiggle, it's naturally if you were to hold still and if you sunk in when the tide was all the way out, you might have time where it regains its balance. Because when you step on it, it's jostling that. And the analogy he used is it's like a pile of oranges where you dislodge those oranges and they all cascade down your footstep or your pressure on the sand is like that too. You kind of send this cascade, which pulls you in. Well that equilibrium is going to restore itself. So the sand is naturally going to Bob you back out and push you up. However much of the quicksand in the world is entitled areas with oceans.
Speaker 1 04:10 So the ways that you can die from quicksand do exist of the tides coming and you haven't had long enough or you're wiggling around and freaking out. So it's keeping you in. I need it sucked in by the tide and it didn't even sound too much like you can get crushed by it. But it sounds like that is, uh, a little bit of a possibility where you're panicking, you breathe in and it fills in the space. But again, if you hold still, it's gonna settle itself and push you out. Yeah. What you're saying is don't panic. Right. And you'll be fine. It is interesting he was talking about how much, if you try to pull somebody out, like you're going to grab them and you're going to, you're going to help pull them out. Uh, it showed that this, to release one foot, you'd need the, to provide the force of 100,000 Newtons, which is the equivalent strength to lifting a medium sized car.
Speaker 1 04:57 So you really do have to do that swimming motion to adjust the stand around you. People aren't gonna be able to really pull you out. So do indeed avoid quicksand. Everybody. Okay, but there's another thing, this is going to be a long one, but I want to talk about dry quicksand cause that's what you see in the princess pride and you're like how do they not die of aspiration and that is the way you can drive quick sand or the dry quicksand is a different story and it is indeed a potentially fatal. The existence in nature of dry quicksand is a little debated because what has to happen is there has to be a lot of air between each sand granule. Normally they're too dense for us to really get too far down into, it's not going to pull you in. You can settle on top, you can bury yourself, but it's not going to suck you in.
Speaker 1 05:39 But if there's a lot of air between each Sam granule, then you can get sucked in. But to have air come underneath and up into sand is unlikely. But where you do experience this is in places like grain silos. Yes. The BBC reported a 2002 case where a German farmer fell into his grain late in the evening and he had like eight silos. And so by the time the firefighters figured out, somebody reported he was missing, they found him. He was up to his armpits and he was getting dragged down because of that. It's all just shifting in the air, makes room for him. People are in there trying to get him. What they did was because he'd breathe in and the grain would fill in and he couldn't do not strong enough to push that back out and survive. So he was getting tight for air. They put a cylinder over the man's body, so they're kind of stuck it down through the grain and then they vacuumed out the grain from around it and were able to just pop them out. Yeah. That's some ingenuity. I would've stood there panicking. It'd be like Paul Paul and you dislocate sockets and it wouldn't be great at all. So quick sound, everybody.
Speaker 0 06:46 Wow. You know, that's solution is how you dig for really deep clams. Oh yes it is. Yeah. Cause like, yeah, when I was a kid you'd take a a metal garbage can. You cut the bottom off of it, a clean new garbage can and go down to the beach and you drive that sucker into the sand and then you can dig out what's inside the garbage can without having the rest of the beach. Cause that sand is wet and woozy coming into your hole.
Speaker 1 07:13 That's true. I saw those last summer. We went to the beach. People have these, I think they're called like clam cannons or something like that. They're on a handle like a shovel and it's a cylinder about the size of a coffee can and you just ran that thing down and then you close off the little air hole in the top and suck it out so that the sand comes with it and there's the clam cause you just drop this pile of sand on the beach. It seems a little cheater but it's awesome. It does seem, well,
Speaker 0 07:37 I mean a young me who had to do a lot of digging, leaning over a garbage can feels a little like, that's not fair. If you are not stuck in quick sand, don't forget to ask your smart speaker to play brain junk podcast and you can also find us on Twitter as at my brain junk. We're also on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast. Amy and I will rescue you if you need it and we'll catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know and I guarantee you will not be bored.
