Mentos Ice Cube Exploding Soda Practical Joke - Great Idea… But It’s a Hoax

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It’s an e-mail that probably showed up in your inbox… Create an Exploding Drink! The prank is based on the widely known phenomenon of dropping MENTOS® chewy mints into soda to create an erupting geyser. Instead of just dropping the Mentos into soda, the pranksters suggest freezing a Mento in the middle of an ice cube. Serve your friend a refreshing soda drink and garnish with the tainted ice cubes. When the ice cube melts, the Mento is exposed and the soda erupts everywhere.

Great idea, right? I first saw the article in WIRED and blog sites like BoingBoing.net were quick to pick it up. Here’s the amazing part… there are literally hundreds and hundreds of comments about why it should or shouldn’t work, but up until today, I had yet to read about anyone who had actually tried it. If you really understand the science behind the physical reaction of releasing all of the carbon dioxide in the soda, you might guess that this is all a big hoax (not the first science experiment hoax we’ve seen in our inboxes).

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Mentos Geyser Tube Crosses the Border

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A few months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Dave Reed, the VP of Technology for eSpeakers, at the Winter NSA Conference in Orlando.  Dave talked to me about the work he is doing in Mexico with his family and I gladly passed on a few science gadgets to take back to his home in Ajijic, Mexico.  As it turns out, the Mentos Geyser Tube™ is a hit in any country!  Dave sent me an email recently and let me know that his 10 year old son, Riley was the hit of his school’s science fair.  Dave was even kind enough to send some pictures of the Geyser Tube in action with his son.

I love hearing stories about how making science fun can overcome all boundaries, even those between countries!  Thanks Dave for the great follow-up and congratulations to Riley… keep up the great work and happy experimenting!

Mentos Geyser Tube Featured on Food Detectives

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Ted Allen, host of Food Detectives on the Food Network, featured a segment using our Mentos Geyser Tube toy as a trigger device for their exploding soda segment. The producers did a nice job of explaining the science behind the eruption and even shared a cool variation of slowly lowering several Mentos into the bottle using a piece of wire. The demo showed why the Mentos have to quickly sink to the bottom of the bottle if you want to get a huge eruption. In their explanation, the microbiologist expert said that diet soda is used because the aspartame weakened the surface tension of the liquid which aided in the eruption. However, we know from experimentation that regular soda works well, too. Does regular sugar also weaken the surface tension? Dropping Mentos into plain seltzer water produces almost no eruption. Does this suggest that the surface tension of the liquid is higher in the plain seltzer water than it is in regular soda or diet soda?

You see… that’s why the Mentos soda geyser keeps showing up time and time …

Don’t Try to Make a Mentos Geyser Using Mentos Gum

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After launching thousands and thousands of Mentos Geysers, we like to eat Mentos as much as we play with them. We also love to chew Mentos gum, but learned early on that Mentos gum doesn’t work for the old geyser trick. The guys in the video below discovered the same thing. After watching the video a few times, our consensus is that all 250 bottles didn’t actually get Mentos gum (the students would have been just a little more upset with the cost of wasting 250 bottles of soda and 1000 pieces of gum), but you be the judge. The loading device, on the other hand, is very cool. Nice job.

Intern Gets a Little Wet While Launching 700 Mentos Diet Coke Geysers at NAEYC 2008

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It’s tough to really demonstrate the Mentos Geyser Tube in an exhibit hall filled with teahcers… until we created the Mentos Geyser Chamber. It’s a plastic box that measures 4 feet square and 7 feet tall. It’s the perfect enclosure to launch off a few hundred Mentos Diet Coke geysers. The only other thing you need is someone to stand inside the box for a few hours. Most of the time, Drew Vriesman is an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, studying marketing. But when he puts on his intern hat at Steve Spangler Science, he’s never quite sure what to expect. Drew Vriesman and Taylor Marsh took turns launching geysers at the NAEYC 2008 conference in Dallas. Combined they launched 700 erupting Diet Coke geysers using over 4,000 MENTOS® Chewy Mints. The interns spent about 20 hours in the Geyser Box over three days and entertained (or amused) about 15,000 teachers who stopped by the Steve Spangler Science booth.