Obviously, most people study hydrodynamics for its many practical benefits in everyday life, viz., understanding shear-thinning colloidal fluids allows one to escape quicksand.
While a popular treatment of the phenomenon should keep most of my readers safe, it lacks many technical details found in the literature. Most quicksand is not lethal if dealt with correctly, but some researchers are less optimistic about the possibility of survival.
I particularly recommend this literature to students majoring in physics. Should one of you die a slow, agonizing quicksand-induced death, you would have only yourself (or, more precisely, your ignorance of the rheology of saturated granular beds) to blame. This would be particularly embarassing for the dual geology / physics major, who is not unlikely to encounter such perilous situations during field work.