Postby Sinkman61 » Fri Sep 01, 2023 7:24 am
Your buoyancy force is roughly 1/2 of your weight. It’s not going to decrease unless you exhale, and it’s not going to increase unless you inhale. The suction can vary drastically, based on the thickness and makeup of the quicksand that your in. Your footwear has a huge impact on the amount of suction that’s created as well. Yes, you can sink below the surface. If you keep pushing one foot after the other deeper and deeper into the material, and the material is thick enough that it doesn’t flow fast enough to fill in a void that you try to leave beneath your feet, the suction created is more than sufficient to hold you down. That suction can be as strong as the amount of energy required to lift a medium sized car. But your buoyancy will never exceed half that of your weight. The suction will always win. You WILL sink below the surface. But…all you have to do to stop sinking is to stop pushing your feet further down. That’s why panicking can be dangerous. Because if you sink beneath the surface, it’s because you panicked. The quicksand itself isn’t going to pull you deeper. You’re doing that on your own, every time you shove your foot down deeper. The suction is more than strong enough to prevent that foot from being pulled back up, and when you pull hard, you tend to just drive your other foot down deeper as well. Of course, that’s called sinking. Your buoyancy point has already been exceeded. If it was going to keep you from sinking deeper, it already would have. Many of us have sunk down well below our buoyancy point and didn’t have to hold ourselves down, because the suction was more than enough to keep us down already. The deeper you go, the more suction that can be created to hold you down. But unless you’re blowing up balloons under the surface, your buoyancy will remain the same.
If you weigh 200 pounds, you’ll have roughly 100 pounds of buoyancy force. If the quicksand that you’re in n create about 80 pounds worth of suction, you’ll float. If the quicksand can create 3000 pounds of suction, you’ll still float. Until you push your feet down into the quicksand deeper. Then you’re going to float, but you’re going to be deeper in the quicksand. It’s not going to ever pull you down deeper than you’ve managed to push your feet. But you’re not going to float back up until your buoyancy exceeds the strength of the suction. Science says you can’t sink below the surface. For 99% of the quicksands out there, that’s true. It’s that other 1 %…that thicker stuff that doesn’t flow so easily, yet you keep shoving your feet down into, deeper and deeper. You’ll sink down past your buoyancy point and never even know it. That’s because the suction is so much stronger than your buoyancy that your buoyancy becomes irrelevant. It’s a very scary feeling when you’ve sank down to your nose and when you go to escape, your feet won’t move upwards as you inevitably end up pushing them even further down in your feeble attempt to escape. You can still escape. But it’s going to be a very long, difficult process.
