![]() farm workers perish every year, drowned in flax or millet.The Atom guest-stars in "The Man Who Wiped Out Time!" There's even quicksand in grain silos, where several dozen U.S. The physicist Dirk Kadau has described so-called " living quicksands" on the shores of drying lagoons in Brazil. Researchers now debate evidence of dry desert quicksands and treacherous pits of powdered snow. Step in one of these, and it collapses like a house of cards-before reforming in a dense pack around your feet. But in the past 10 years or so, physicists have started looking at more interesting formations of sediment, in places where grains of sand or clay are assembled in delicate, latticelike structures. That's ordinary sand that has been saturated with upwelling moisture: Given enough water, the sand liquefies, and the grains start to flow like a viscous fluid. Traditional scientific accounts describe just one type-the classic "artesian quicksand" shown in the MythBusters episode. If anything, recent work on unstable granular media has revealed a far more diverse and complex set of phenomena than anyone imagined. ![]() In any case, it's trivial to say that science has "debunked" quicksand. Crypto has identified wet jungle quicksands and dry desert pits, bogs and quagmires, areas of wet cement-even scenes of people sinking into giant vats of caviar. The list is a quixotic and startlingly thorough record of sinking scenes in scripted TV and feature films, as well as commercials, video games, reality shows, cartoons, documentaries, and music videos. Known informally as "Crypto's List," it's now been through 28 published versions the most recent contains more than 1,000 entries, starting with the silent Gaumont melodrama "Rescued from the Quicksand" from 1909 and ending with an episode of the Japanese anime series, Deltora Quest, from 2007. The 47-year-old computer programmer, who lives outside of Toronto, compiled the first version of his " Guide to TV & Movie Quicksand Scenes" back in 1998. To keep track of each discovery and loose end, the user named "Crypto" took on the role of encyclopedist. Plenty of scenes have been identified but never copied or ripped from a DVD. The collective effort extends beyond the tapes, however. "The search is endless," says Edwards, "it goes on and on and on." He shared the news, and the race was on for the original footage. (References to the New York-based post-hardcore band Quicksand proved especially annoying.) And sometimes they relied on dumb luck: One day, Duncan Edwards happened to pick up a copy of Life magazine from 1961 at a flea market, and, flipping through the pages, found a film publicity still showing pin-up girl Anita Ekberg sinking in a pool of sand and water. They sifted through IMDB plot summaries and discussed ways to keep the metaphorical uses of quicksand from polluting their Google searches. They scoured the shelves at video-rental stores for movies with island or jungle in their titles. Clips were shared over the Internet, and the community began working together to dig up new, undiscovered examples of quicksand cinema. With communication came the possibility of collaboration, and a more structured way to assemble this knowledge. By the mid-1990s, individual quicksand fans were already conducting their own private surveys of the genre, and making libraries of scenes dubbed to VHS.
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