Creating A Volcano

Kitchen Chemistry

Today's 'Kitchen Chemisty' science experiment was to create a volcano using baking soda and vinegar. We began by writing up the experiment and by making predictions about what we thought might happen.

Then we took a lemonade bottle filled with warm water and added 6 drops of detergent to it.

We dug a hole in the sand pit to put the bottle in.

We placed the water and detergent into the hole.


Then we built a mound of sand around the neck of the bottle to make it look like a volcano



We patted the sand firmly around the bottle.

Finally we were ready to start the experiment.

We added a few drops of food colouring (for effect). We used red but you can also use orange and purple for a real display of colour.

It looked cool looking into the top of our 'volcano'

Then we added two desertspoons of baking soda. We had to use our hands to create a funnel to get it all into the neck of the bottle.

Lastly, we slowly poured vinegar into our volcano. Then we sat back and waited for the 'eruption.'

Slowly the pink bubbles started to rise up and spill over the top of the volcano, and as the bubbles continued mixture spilled down the side of the volcano.

It wasn't quite the eruption we had hoped for. It was all quite slow, but the bubbles continued to pour out....

...until, some people put their fingers in the 'eruption' which halted the reaction immediately and even when we tried to add more vinegar we could not get it started again.

Conclusion:

The baking soda and vinegar caused a chemical reaction. In this reaction carbon dioxide gas was produced, pressure built up in the bottle and gas bubbled (thanks to the detergent) out of the top. When people touched the bubbles the reaction stopped.

Questions to consider for the future:

Would the reaction be more explosive if the bottle was smaller and had less water in it?

Would the reaction continue for longer if we didn't put our fingers in it?

Would it look better if we had more food colouring in it?

Check out what our experiment looked like for yourself and draw your own conclusions...