Some grad students gathered today to find out what happens when you mix carbonated soda with regular old Mentos (a.k.a. The Fresh Maker!).

Procedure:

1. Roll a sheet of paper into a cylinder. Make the diameter of the tube just slightly bigger than the diameter of a mentos mint.

2. Open the soda bottle.

3. Fill the tube with mentos (15 works quite well) and position it over the bottle, keeping a seperate slip of paper between the mentos and the bottle. The seperate sheet of paper hold the mentos in the tube, until firing time.

4. Quickly remove the slip of paper, allowing the mentos to fall into the soda.

5. Stand back, or take careful aim!

Results:

Here are some videos. We tried three types of soda: Coke, Diet Coke, and Shasta brand tonic water. The video for the Coke did not work well. Diet coke worked tremendoulsy, and the tonic water was sort of a let-down after seeing the Diet Coke Geyser! The heights were approximately as follows: Coke (~ 7 feet), Diet Coke (~13 feet), Tonic Water (~1.5 ft.) Thank you to Renee for making the videos.

Diet Coke (3.7 Mb)

Tonic Water (3.7 Mb)

Here is an explanation of what's happening.