Just after noon on the day before Thanksgiving 2011, 25-year-old NOLS student Rob Tesar unwittingly walked into quicksand in the Utah backcountry. Half a day later, he was still stuck upright, trying ...

Quicksand has been a favorite trope in Hollywood movies for years. Many think of quicksand as being able to engulf humans whole in a matter of a seconds, but does it work that way? Quicksand is formed ...

If stumbling into quicksand ranks on your list of worries, don't panic. You won't sink in—at least not all the way. Real quicksand is certainly hard to get out of, but it doesn't suck people under the ...

Quicksand has a lethal reputation: a surprisingly high percentage of movie villains drown in it, and quite a few heroes have saved a damsel in distress from a silty, sloppy end. But quicksand is much ...

Why was quicksand a major peril in 1960s movies, but suddenly no longer scary in the 1990s? In an entertaining essay for Slate, Dan Engber explains how quicksand is getting sucked out of pop culture – ...

For the first 20 minutes that 34-year-old hiker Ryan Osmun was stuck in quicksand, he thought everything would be all right. “I pretty much thought it was mud,” Osmun says now, six months after he ...

Death-by-quicksand is a favourite of B-movie directors. But would a hapless cowboy or bandit really be sucked under? BBC Future pokes a tentative toe into the science… We’ve all seen the films. A man ...