It has long been known that carbonated drinks fizz up with the introduction of sugar. But what happens when you drop a Mentos mint into a bottle of Diet Coke? Amateur videos have started popping up on YouTube and other such video networks in recent months. The video that has made Mentos and Diet Coke the topic of online conversation in the last two weeks was launched at www.eepybird.com on June 3, 2006, by Fritz Grobe and Stephen Volz in Maine. Grobe and Volz work with Mike and Kim Miclon to record a range of geyser effects as they drop especially rigged tubes of Mentos into bottles with holes in their lids and sides.
According to Wall Street Journal on June 12, Mentos is considering making a deal with the EepyBird pair. Perhaps, with a little investment from Mentos, the Maine experiment could appear on televisions in a similar approach taken by Miller Light with last year’s Christmas Lights.
The main video on the EepyBird site is an 11.4 mb quicktime film, featuring experiment Number 4 (one bottle and 4 Mentos) and Experiment Number 137, with 101 two-liter bottles of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos.
The soundtrack used is “You Gotta Tap”, a track from AudioBody‘s debut album. Audiobody is the work of Matthew Tardy, juggling peformance artist.
Click on the image below to play the video.
Steve Spangler provides a useful chemical/physical explanation for the Diet Coke/Mentos reactions, focusing on the pitted surface of each Mentos mint. See his site for instructions on repeating the experiment.
See the Mentos Geyser Video Contest, to be launched on July 20.
Love the menots diet coke experiment. Did it with my 4 year old this weekend and explained what a chemical reaction and how a volcano erupts. He was digging bigtime. We found another cool site with fun science experiments to do. Will post
the link below for anyone interested.
http://weirdsciencekids.com/FunExperiments.html
It was awesome did it for Science project