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Description

Make Your Own Quicksand

Quick sand is a fascinating substance, make some of your own and experiment on a safe scale. Amaze your friends by demonstrating how it works.

Suitable for Virtual Group Guiding

Kindly submitted by Carla Werder

Resources

What you'll need:

1 cup of maize cornflour

Half a cup of water

A large plastic container

A spoon

Instructions

Instructions:

This one is simple, just mix the cornflour and water thoroughly in the container to make your own instant quick sand.

When showing other people how it works, stir slowly and drip the quick sand to show it is a liquid.

Stirring it quickly will make it hard and allow you to punch or poke it quickly (this works better if you do it fast rather than hard).

Remember that quick sand is messy, try to play with it outside and don’t forget to stir just before you use it.

Always stir instant quicksand just before you use it!

 

What's happening?

If you add just the right amount of water to cornflour it becomes very thick when you stir it quickly. This happens because the cornflour grains are mixed up and can’t slide over each other due to the lack of water between them.

Stirring slowly allows more water between the cornflour grains, letting them slide over each other much easier.

Poking it quickly has the same effect, making the substance very hard.  If you poke it slowly it doesn’t mix up the mixture in the same way, leaving it runny.  It works in much the same way as real quick sand.

Quicksand in Nature

Quicksand is an interesting natural phenomenon, it is actually solid ground that has been liquefied by a saturation of water. The "quick" refers to how easily the sand shifts when in this semi liquid state.

Quicksand is created when water saturates an area of loose sand and the ordinary sand is agitated. When the water trapped in the batch of sand can't escape, it creates liquefied soil that can no longer support weight. There are two ways in which sand can become agitated enough to create quicksand:

- Flowing underground water - The force of the upward water flow opposes the force of gravity, causing the granules of sand to be more buoyant.
- Earthquakes - The force of the shaking ground can increase the pressure of shallow groundwater, which liquefies sand and silt deposits. The liquefied surface loses strength, causing buildings or other objects on that surface to sink or fall over.

The vibration plus the water barrier reduces the friction between the sand particles and causes the sand to behave like a liquid.

If you ever fell into quicksand....

Don't move around!

The human body has a density of 62.4 pounds per cubic foot (1 g/cm3) and is able to float on water.
Quicksand is denser than water , it has a density of about 125 pounds per cubic foot (2 g/cm3) , which means you can float more easily on quicksand than on water.

When you try pulling your leg out of quicksand, you are working against a vacuum left behind by the movement.

The key is to not panic and you will float to the top! Move as slowly as possible in order to reduce viscosity. Also, try spreading your arms and legs far apart and leaning over to increase your surface area, which should allow you to float.

Tags

• GGNZ
• GGNZ Virtual Guiding
• GGNZ Virtual Unit
• virtual

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