Make your own home-made volcano!
Materials:
- An empty, 1/2 litre water bottle
- Baking soda
- Vinger
- Dish detergent
- Optional: red food colouring
- Optional: something to cover the bottle and make it look like a volcano. You can use some sand and bury it in a small mountain in your backyard, or else make dough from 3 cups of flour, 2 cups of salt and half a cup of cooking oil, then wrap it around the bottle.
The experiment:
1. Fill the bottle with
warm tap water. Add a bit of dish detergent, and some baking soda
(2 tablespoons or a bit more). Now we're ready for
action!
2. You may add
some food colouring to make it look cool. Now position the bottle
inside a mountain of sand in your backyard, or wrap some dough
around to make it look like a volcano. Cool!
3. Make sure that if
you're doing this indoors, place the volcano on a deep dish, or at
least on some newspapers. Wouldn't want your mother to be mad at a
volcanic eruption all over her new kitchen floor, would
we?
4. Ready? Set…
Go! Add the vinegar to the bottle and stand back. Watch the volcano
erupt like crazy!
My personal tip- add some toy soldiers around and watch them perish on the mini-scaled natural disaster. You can have a reenactment of how Mount Vesuvius destroyed the Greek city of Pompeii! Super-cool.
Hey, you can watch this experiment on video right here! Note that this kid put the vinegar in the bottle and added the baking soda and we have it the other way around, but both work!
The chemistry behind the scenes:
So, what caused this cool volcanic eruption to occur?
Baking soda contains
sodium bicarbonate, . Sodium
bicarbonate is an amphoteric substance, which
means that it can react with both acids and bases to neutralize
them. This makes it a useful compound in most labs to clean up
spills!
Vinegar contains acetic
acid, , which is of course an acid. This would make sense
because vinegar is sour.
As we've said, sodium
bicarbonate and acids (including acetic acid) react in a
neutralization reaction. It looks like this: .
The products of the reaction are water, sodium acetate (which is a
sodium salt used to give taste to vinegar-flavoured chips), and
carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide,
,
is a well-known gas. It forms the bubbles in the dish detergent
that causes the whole thing to rise and "erupt". Carbon dioxide is
the same compound that's used as bubbles in soft drinks, so when
you shake a can of coke and open it up only for it to erupt in your
hand, the same thing happens as in your volcano! How cool is
that?
This is the entire chemical reaction that's the basis for your mini-volcano!
Chemistry is cool!
