Science fun: mentos + soda = explosion

I'm old enough to never have done this in school, but I hear it's big in science classes these days.

I first read about it in The Star's article "Pepsi and Mentos -- How a high-school teacher's science experiment became an Internet phenomenon and taught kids about nucleation sites along the way."

The first paragraph reads:

Before hitting the big time, the "Mentos effect" was a schoolteacher's gimmick to make 13-year-olds listen up in science class. Drop an unwrapped roll of Mentos into a freshly opened 2L bottle of soda and stand back. The pop becomes a geyser of foam guaranteed to soak the ceiling of anybody foolish enough to try it indoors.

And the obligatory Google search turned up a bazillion sites describing this experiment.

But my favourite one is this from EepyBird.com. Two-hundred liters of Diet Coke combined with over 500 Mentos mints. It's amazing and completely insane.