What do you get when you mix acid, soap and food dye?
Elephant toothpaste, apparently. No, this isn’t a shitty Christmas cracker joke and no, I don’t mean actual toothpaste for elephants.
What I’m referring to is the name of a viral experiment conducted by YouTubers Nick Uhas and David Dobrik, where they created a huge foam volcano using all of the ingredients I just mentioned.
You can watch the moment the foam volcano explodes below:
Pretty impressive, right? So just how exactly did the two men go about creating such a weird and wonderful, erm, creation? Let me explain…
The YouTubers were re-creating a similar attempt by NASA engineer Mark Rober earlier this year, something he described as the ‘world’s largest elephant toothpaste experiment’. Uhas and Dobrik hoped to beat this with their attempt, and they did with their new ‘world record’.
In order to make their experiment bigger and better than ever before, the two men ensured they had a decent-sized space to work with – David’s garden – and set to work.
In the YouTube video, Uhas explains the science behind the experiment which resulted in 200 cubic metres of foam spilling over the backyard of David’s Californian home.
The experiment involves mixing hydrogen peroxide, soap and food colouring dye before ‘catalysing a rapid decomposition of the hydrogen peroxide with the potassium iodide’. The substance then transforms into oxygen gas, which grows larger and gets stuck in the soapy water.
This creates bubbles, with the foam-like substance growing to an incredible size when the mixture reacts and explodes dramatically all over the garden – resulting in a number of the YouTubers’ helpers running inside to safety.
Uhas explained in the video:
We start with 35% hydrogen peroxide and we add soap and food colouring dye, we then add a catalyst potassium iodine in our case.
When these two chemicals mix together it strips one of the oxygen’s of the hydrogen peroxide which creates oxygen gas.
This gas then gets caught in the soap mixture and creates a tonne of foam very fast if you use the right catalyst.
How rapidly the reaction proceeds will depend on the concentration of hydrogen peroxide, with Uhas and Dobrik’s attempt ultimately beating that of Rober’s because of this.
Well, there you have it folks. An early Christmas present for anyone who wants to go out and make elephant toothpaste… whoever you are.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).