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Chemistry Experiment: mini-volcano

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, NaHCO_3. 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, CH_3COOH, 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: NaHCO_3<ins cite=":"><span class="caps">MATH</span>_1:: \to NaCH_3COO+H_2O</ins>CO_2. 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, CO_2, 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!

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