The Bellagio – in Diet Coke and Mentos
For you would be Brainiacs..
Apparently, you can drop a few Mentos and get a really big reaction. Within a second after the splash – you get a tremendous geyser of diet coke shooting skyward.
For example:
Mentos and Diet Coke
Why does this happen? According to “Steve Spangler Science Experiments”:
When you drop the Mentos into the soda, the gelatin and gum arabic from the dissolving candy break the surface tension. This disrupts the water mesh, so that it takes less work to expand and form new bubbles. Each Mentos candy has thousands of tiny pits all over the surface. These tiny pits are called nucleation sites – perfect places for carbon dioxide bubbles to form. As soon as the Mentos hit the soda, bubbles form all over the surface of the candy. Couple this with the fact that the Mentos candies are heavy and sink to the bottom of the bottle and you’ve got a double-whammy. When all this gas is released, it literally pushes all of the liquid up and out of the bottle in an incredible soda blast.
Yeah, and it’s cool, too!
Now – go bananas with it. Take 101 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke and 500-some Mentos, and you’ve got the Bellagio’s fountain.
Mentos and Diet Coke Bellagio Fountain
Those gentlemen are REAL AMERICAN HEROS.
