Talk:Dry quicksand

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GNNNN!!!!

Dry quicksand is a loose sand which yields easily to weight or pressure. Different from regular quicksand, dry quicksand does not cointain any water. Up to recently, it was believed that dry quicksand was a legend, and the reports of humans and complete caravans being lost in dry quicksand were considered fictional.

However, Detlef Lohse of Universiteit Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, experimentally prooved the almost non-existing load bearing capacity of dry quicksand. Lohse disturbed small sand grains with a size of about 10 µm in an air stream and let them sink to the ground. Only about 41% of the volume was occupied by sand, and 59% by air, whereas completely settled sand occupies about 55 to 60% of the volume. This reduced the weight bearing capability to almost nothing. A table tennis ball was placed carefully on the settled sand, but even though this ball is extremely light, it disappeared completely in the sand within less than a second. A small column of sand also jumped up in the air where the ball vanished, similar to a stone fropped in water. The final depth at which the ball came to rest depended on theweight of the ball.

You beat me by 5 minutes in creating this new article. I just wrote the above text but got in an edit conflict with your new article. Do you also read the german Spiegel? However, your article is better, anyway. Damn -- Chris 73 Talk 13:42, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

Hi Chris. Thanks for the feedback!

I'd appreciate your thoughts on the duplication between granular material (which was mine) and granular matter (which I didn't know existed). One day I'll get round to combining the pages and redirecting.

best wishes

Robinh 15:55, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)