Remember When You Were Afraid of Quicksand?

When you were much younger, all kinds of adventure movies had a scene in which the protagonist or someone close to the protagonist fell into quicksand and had to be rescued before they slipped completely under and immediately drowned. Yeah, those movies still have those scenes, but new movies, not so much. Sinking in quicksand was an easy way for filmmakers to establish dangers lurking around every corner, get rid of minor characters, and give the hero something heroic to do. It happened so often on screen that it became a cliché, and that's why it's rarely used now. The fact that we learned that quicksand is not nearly as common nor dangerous as we were led to believe may have had something to do with it as well. But quicksand is a real thing, and it can kill you if conditions are just right. Weird History explains the difference between the movie version and real life, and how we can avoid dying in quicksand ourselves.   


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We just had a quicksand "incident" at Popham Beach State Park. Oi. It quickly went viral and was picked up by the usual flagship clickbait news organizations like the New York Post and Fox News. Poor woman, who was with her husband at one of the most popular (and beautiful) parks in the State. Thought I was going to die! What if it had been a child!? We need more signs! Absolutely straight out of the movies. Park rangers did a great job of patiently explaining that everyone needed to calm down,
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Quicksand is real- its just found in coastal mud flats. Its typically only seen at low tide. You wont get sucked under, but you can easily become stuck and unable to move. That wont kill you.
What will kill you is high tide.
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