10 Wild Facts You Might Not Know About Quicksand

Movies and TV shows have led many people to believe quicksand is a common outdoor hazard, with countless scenes showing characters getting stuck in the substance, including in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Blazing Saddles (1974). While quicksand was portrayed as something anyone trekking through nature might readily encounter, in real life very few people ever come across it, leading some to think it was made up for the movies. But the unstable, water-saturated sand is very real and can be dangerous. Here are 10 fascinating facts you probably didn’t know about quicksand.

Related: 10 Unexpected Ways Your Car May Be a Danger to You and Others

10 You Can’t Fully Sink in Quicksand

Many people think that, without outside help, stepping into quicksand is a death sentence. Although sinking happens slowly, most people believe someone trapped in the substance will eventually be completely submerged, as often seen in movies and TV shows. But under normal conditions, it’s nearly impossible to sink fully into ordinary water-saturated quicksand—no matter how deep it is.

Quicksand is a mixture of water and fine sand, sometimes containing silt or clay. It behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid—that is, a material that doesn’t obey Newton’s law of viscosity. When undisturbed, quicksand can appear solid, but applied pressure—such as someone stepping onto it—can cause it to behave more like a liquid.

A person generally can’t sink much deeper than the waist because of the density difference. Human bodies have a density of about 2.2 pounds per quart (1 kilogram per liter), while quicksand can be about twice as dense, meaning that the body will remain buoyant rather than disappearing completely beneath the surface.^[1]

9 Quicksand Can Be Deadly Because of Outside Factors

While it’s nearly impossible for a human body to be sucked completely under by quicksand alone, having even one leg trapped can become dangerous. Although deaths are rare, people immobilized in quicksand can face other threats, including drowning when the tide comes in, hypothermia when the temperature drops, heat exhaustion, and dehydration from a lack of water.

Quicksand can form on beaches, tidal flats, riverbanks, and near underground springs—places where environmental conditions may pose a greater danger than the quicksand itself. Someone trapped in a tidal area, for instance, could be unable to escape before rising water submerges them. The quicksand doesn’t pull the person underneath, but it may prevent them from getting out of the way of a much more dangerous force.^[2]

8 It’s Possible to Free Yourself from Quicksand

Another Hollywood lie is that once you’re in quicksand, you can’t free yourself and have to rely on someone else to pull you out. But in many cases, you can escape without assistance. It can actually be extremely difficult for someone to pull you straight out because the force required to yank a deeply trapped leg free may be comparable to lifting a car.

The way to free yourself from the viscous substance is to make small, slow back-and-forth movements with your legs. This helps loosen the compacted sand and allows water to flow around the trapped limb. If possible, it’s also best to lean backward because spreading your weight over a larger area will make it harder to sink farther. Forceful pulling and frantic struggling will only make matters worse.

However, there are rare instances when this advice isn’t enough—as Austin Dirks found out while hiking through Utah’s Arches National Park in December 2025. His leg became trapped at an awkward angle in cold, compacted sand, making it impossible for him to lean back or move into a better position. He sent an SOS message through his Garmin inReach, a compact satellite communication device, and rescuers eventually located him with a drone. After hours in near-freezing conditions, a team using ladders, traction boards, and shovels finally freed him.^[3]

7 The Qattara Depression Contains Treacherous Quicksand-Like Terrain

Most people can go their entire lives without encountering quicksand—which is why some believe it isn’t even real—because the unstable substance isn’t actually all that common. But in some places, soft sand, mud, and salt marshes make the terrain dangerously difficult to cross.

One of the most striking examples is the Qattara Depression, a roughly teardrop-shaped basin in Egypt that stretches across approximately 7,500 square miles (19,400 square kilometers). Although it is sometimes described as the world’s largest sinkhole, it is more accurately a vast below-sea-level depression formed through erosion and salt weathering.

The entire depression isn’t quicksand. Its floor contains salt pans, sand dunes, dry lake beds, salt marshes, and large areas of sticky mud and soft sand. This treacherous mixture has severely limited travel and settlement across much of the basin. One exception is Qara Oasis on the western edge, which is home to around 300 people—who presumably tread very carefully.^[4]

6 Earthquakes Can Create Quicksand-Like Ground

Much of the damage during an earthquake occurs when strong shaking causes structures to collapse. But earthquakes can also trigger other destructive phenomena, including tsunamis, fires, landslides, and soil liquefaction.

Liquefaction is related to quicksand, although the two aren’t exactly the same. It occurs when earthquake shaking causes loose, water-saturated sediment to lose its strength. Pressure rises in the water between the soil grains, leaving the ground temporarily unable to support heavy objects.

This process can occur in seconds and may cause cars and houses to sink or tilt, buried tanks to rise, and roads and pipelines to shift or rupture. Water and sediment may also erupt through the surface in features known as sand boils.

Although liquefaction doesn’t happen during every earthquake, it has caused widespread damage in several major disasters, including the 1964 Niigata earthquake in Japan. The 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence in New Zealand also produced repeated liquefaction, particularly during the September 2010 Darfield earthquake and the destructive Christchurch earthquakes of 2011.^[5]

5 Quicksand Has Been a Movie Trope Since the Start of Cinema

According to research by Slate, quicksand was at its onscreen peak during the 1960s, appearing in nearly 3% of films—or approximately one in every 35. But long before its Hollywood heyday, quicksand had appeared during cinema’s early years.

Cinema got its start during the 1890s, and by 1909, the dangers of quicksand had been captured on celluloid in Saved from the Quicksands. This 12-minute black-and-white silent film was created by the French production company Gaumont and begins with a man getting stuck in quicksand on a beach.

He manages to free himself just as the tide is coming in but winds up trapped on a rock. Hooded monks from a nearby monastery eventually notice the stranded traveler and rescue him. The plot helped establish a screen formula repeated for decades: a victim immobilized by unstable ground while some additional danger—usually the tide, a predator, or a villain—rapidly approaches.^[6]

4 Prehistoric Animals Could Become Food If They Were Trapped in Quicksand

While humans caught in quicksand today are most likely to die from exposure or drowning, prehistoric animals immobilized in the sludge could become easy food for predators and scavengers.

A study published in 2024 examined the 1.4-million-year-old Fuente Nueva 3 archaeological site in Spain’s Guadix-Baza Depression. The site contains abundant fossils from large mammals, including the extinct southern mammoth, Mammuthus meridionalis. Researchers concluded that fine sand near the edge of an ancient lake may have acted as a natural quicksand trap for these massive animals.

The site also preserves stone tools, animal bones bearing signs of butchery, tooth marks left by carnivores, and fossilized hyena droppings. Together, this evidence suggests that early hominins and giant hyenas took advantage of megaherbivores that had become trapped or died in the unstable ground.

The discovery offers one possible explanation for how much smaller predators and scavengers gained access to animals as enormous as mammoths. They didn’t necessarily have to overpower the giants themselves. Sometimes, they only had to wait for the ground to do the hard work.^[7]

3 There’s an Octopus That Makes Quicksand

It’s not uncommon for octopuses to cover themselves with a shallow layer of sand to hide, but the southern sand octopus (Octopus kaurna)—which lives in the sandy coastal waters of southern Australia and around Tasmania—takes things to another level. Unlike many other octopuses, the southern sand octopus lacks color-changing chromatophores, so it instead creates quicksand-like conditions that allow it to submerge completely.

The southern sand octopus uses its siphon—a tube-like structure through which water can flow—to shoot jets of water into the seafloor. The water loosens and fluidizes the sand, allowing the octopus to pull itself down into the sandy sludge in only a few seconds.

Once buried, the octopus uses two of its arms and a mucus-like secretion to construct a stable ventilation shaft leading to the surface. It can then retract its arms and remain concealed beneath the sand while continuing to breathe. The trick comes in very handy if a predator is nearby.^[8]

2 NASA Worried That Lunar Dust Could Swallow the Astronauts

Many unknowns remained when the Apollo missions to the Moon were being planned, and one concern was that the lunar module might sink into a deep layer of loose dust. Scientists knew the Moon’s surface was covered in regolith but couldn’t be certain how firmly that material was packed or whether it could support the weight of a spacecraft.

Some feared that the lunar surface might behave like a form of dry quicksand. Unlike ordinary quicksand, which contains water, experimentally produced dry quicksand consists of extremely loose grains destabilized by air. Similar granular materials can also create deadly entrapment hazards in grain silos. If the Moon’s surface contained a sufficiently deep and unstable layer of dust, the spacecraft and astronauts might sink out of sight.

To investigate this and other hazards, robotic spacecraft were sent to survey the surface. The Soviet Luna 9 probe completed the first successful soft landing on the Moon in February 1966, followed by NASA’s Surveyor 1 that June. The Surveyor missions demonstrated that the lunar surface was firm enough to support a lander.

“The unmanned Surveyor landings indicated a well-compacted surface which would more than adequately support the weight of the [Lunar Module],” astronaut Buzz Aldrin later wrote in Return to Earth. “So this, too, was a relatively minor concern. No one would know for sure, of course, until we were there.” Thankfully, when the lunar module Eagle landed on July 20, 1969, the surface held its weight.^[9]

1 Quicksand Was Blamed for Two Early On-Set Deaths

The film industry has seen many on-set deaths over the years, with cast and crew members tragically dying because of misfiring weapons, car crashes, fires, and other accidents. But two of the earliest documented deaths during a movie production were reportedly connected to quicksand.

On July 1, 1914, a scene for the short Western Across the Border was being filmed along the Arkansas River near Cañon City, Colorado. Lead actress Grace McHugh was crossing the river on horseback when her steed lost its footing and threw her into the water.

A fellow actor on horseback attempted to save her, but the two became separated, and McHugh drifted downstream. Cameraman Owen Carter then entered the river and swam after her. Some accounts later claimed that Carter reached McHugh and pulled her onto a sandbank that turned out to be quicksand, trapping them until the river’s current swept them away.

The Carnegie Hero Fund’s investigation confirmed that Carter entered the swift river and reached McHugh before they both disappeared. However, its surviving account doesn’t establish that they reached a sandbank. Quicksand may have contributed to the tragedy, but the powerful current alone could have caused the drownings.

Some reporters initially suspected that the deaths were a publicity stunt because several days passed before either body was recovered. But the tragedy was painfully real. “I am free to say that I never saw greater heroism displayed by anyone than was displayed by Mr. Carter in this instance,” director Otis B. Thayer wrote after the accident. Carter was posthumously awarded a Carnegie Hero Fund medal for his attempt to save McHugh.^[10]