![]() ![]() ![]() Quicksand is actually an incredibly common phenomenon that occurs all over the world. However, if they were to step on it or throw something in it, they would quickly realize that the surface was not solid and they could sink into it. Most quicksand looks solid, and the vast majority of people probably wouldn’t be able to recognize it was quicksand just by looking at it. These include marshes, riverbanks, beaches, underground springs, and lake shorelines. However, there are some places where it occurs more often than others. Quicksand can form in any area where water is present. If anything touches the surface of the sand, it gives way, and that thing will sink beneath into the liquefied sand. Vibrations and water work together to reduce the friction between sand particles, which makes the sand act like a liquid. Since liquefied sand can no longer hold weight, anything on the surface of it will fall over or sink. When an earthquake causes agitation, the shaking ground increases the pressure of groundwater, which then causes sand and silt deposits to become liquefied. When underground water is the cause of agitation, it usually happens when the water is forced upward and results in the sand granules becoming more buoyant. Sand gets agitated in two ways: from the flow of underground water and from earthquakes. Water gets trapped in the sand and creates liquefied soil, which no longer has the ability to hold any weight. Quicksand is formed when sand is saturated with water and then gets agitated. In essence, it is nothing more than sand and water, and it can occur anywhere if the conditions are right. More often than not, it is just a grainy soil that gets overly wet. While it may seem like quicksand needs a special type of soil to form, it does not. ![]() It is called “quicksand” because of how easy the surface shifts while in this semi-liquid state. Quicksand is a natural phenomenon that forms when solid ground becomes liquefied by water saturation. In this post, we’ll clear up a few things about quicksand: What is quicksand in the first place? How does quicksand form? Where is quicksand found? And is quicksand even that common? While quicksand does exist, it’s not exactly the treacherous pitfall it’s made out to be. If you were to believe the movies, you would think that quicksand was a huge danger and that we should all tread carefully on this earth. If they aren’t so lucky, they will perish in a sandy tomb. Even with a spaceship this journey could take thousands of years or even longer.No doubt, you have seen movies where quicksand sucks unsuspecting characters into its depths. Getting back to wormholes, imagine we want to get from one place to another on the space-time fabric, say from home to the distant planet. Put all the dimensions together, and you get what we call space-time.Ĭurious Kids: Do bees ever accidentally sting other bees? You might not think of time as a “dimension” but physicists do. In fact, there’s a fourth dimension: time. In reality, space is three-dimensional: you can also jump up and down! Someone walking around on the sheet can choose two kinds of movement: going forwards/backwards or going left/right. Everything in our universe lives on this imaginary space-time fabric sheet.īy thinking about the fabric sheet, we are visualising something called a two-dimensional surface. We often imagine space-time as a stretchy fabric sheet. This theory also describes wormholes in a mathematical way.įirst, we need to think about something called space-time. ![]() It describes gravity, which is what keeps us on the Earth and keeps the Earth orbiting the Sun. You might have heard of the theory of general relativity, created by physicist Albert Einstein over a hundred years ago. In science, a theory is an idea or way of describing what happens or could happen in reality. The other end could even be on a far away planet in a distant galaxy and you could easily go out on a day trip to another planet. If you had one end of the wormhole at school, and the other end at home, then you could just step through the wormhole in class and arrive at home. By going through the wormhole, you could - in theory - travel immense distances across space remarkably quickly, even if the two ends of the wormhole were very far apart. – Vaibhav Kannan, age 11, Melbourne.Ī wormhole is like a tunnel connecting two places in space. I am in Year 7 and my question is: what are wormholes, and if they do exist, how do they form and work? Thanks. I’m 11 years old and I live in Melbourne. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky! You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. ![]()
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