Quicksand can't suck you under

news @ nature.com�-�Quicksand can't suck you under�-�Experiments show that humans do not sink all the way into shifting sands.

This ties in very well with the article about sand castles ... only this time, the sand is so saturated with water, that it can not support any weight.
I recall many times as a kid, watching an old Tarzan movie, or jungle movie, where someone was being sucked down into the quicksand. And then, usually the inevitable last gasp as they breached the surface for the last time....... :)
Man! I felt like I was going down in that stuff with them! ;-)

I do have a similar experience however, that I wish these investigators would experiment with. My parents always warned me as a kid, about a ditch near where I was raised, that contained "quicksand". Being an enterprising kid, I had to check it's power out, to determine if quicksand actually worked.
Once you dug down about a foot or so, you would find that this stuff was actually mucky gray clay. The water saturation, however would create a vacuum on your boots or feet ..... and I NEARLY got in a predicament from which I could not escape.

I kept sinking ... and it kept sucking me down deeper! I had a very hard time extricating myself. Stuck down to about knee depth. It's debateable whether or not, I would have eventually sunk down over my head, but at that moment it seemed realistic.

I'm not the only thing that muck caught. When the road next to it, was being built, it managed to capture several pieces of heavy equipment, that required some tow-trucks or other heavy equipment to pull out.