Don’t Mix Coke with Liquid Nitrogen!

We all remember the Diet Coke and Mentos craze from a few years back. Drop a Mentos or 10 into a Diet Coke and watch the insane chemical reaction send plumes of carbonation high into the air, or flip the bottle over and sent the bottle flying. There were literally thousands of videos on the internet of this awesome phenomenon.

Well, there may soon be thousands of clips of YouTubers mixing fluids with liquid nitrogen, because as you can see, the reaction is similar, but much more explosive! This intrepid YouTube host CrazyRussianHacker walks us through the relatively simple process: pour a small cup full of liquid nitrogen into a half-full 2 liter coke bottle, then flip the bottle over and watch it soar into he sky!

The reaction, which likely comes from the warmer liquid in the bottle heating the supercooled nitrogen and causing it to rapidly expand, is pretty spectacular and can be repeated with water, meaning you can try it again and again until you run out of liquid nitrogen. Science is awesome!