Quicksand Sucks: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|''"What is it that's not exactly water, and it ain't exactly earth?"''|'''Bart''', ''[[Blazing Saddles (Film)|Blazing Saddles]]''}}

 

See also [[Sand Is Water]], [[Mucking in The Mud]], [[Swamps Are Evil]], and [[Bubblegloop Swamp]]... Also compare [[Unrealistic Black Hole]] because both black holes and quicksand are portrayed in media as pulling in anything nearby whereas both only consume things which have gotten too close in the first place.

 

== Anime & Manga ==

* Mikan and a friend of hers encounter this in episode 3 of ''Gakuen Alice''.

*** That's why gravel traps are so common at racing circuits. No matter if a car that goes screaming off the tarmac is doing it forwards, backwards or sideways, loose sand and gravel stop it up since the vehicle digs into the gravel, pulling itself in and creating resistance. However, since this also tends to ruin the underbody and wheels of a car, another option that's become popular in recent years is to create a large tarmac runoff area so a driver can recover from a loss of control or error in judgment and quickly rejoin the race. On cars with slicks, especially light ones such as [[Formula One]] cars, they're so grippy that gravel traps actually cause ''more'' slippage in comparison.

* An interesting article on the rise and fall of this trope (it's now [[Discredited Trope|discredited]]) can be found [http://www.slate.com/id/2264312/ here].

* Non-Newtonian fluids behave in a similar way; they are so viscous that if a great deal of force is applied to them in a brief time, they behave like solids, but if the same force is applied slower it will allow it to pass through. It can be very difficult to get something out from being trapped in a pool of a non-Newtonian fluid.

* Soil liquefaction, a rare phenomenon associated with earthquakes, can cause water-saturated sandy ground to temporarily turn so slippery and unstable that it becomes too weak to support buildings' foundations.