Friday 11 November 2011

Volcanoes on Venus

We know that there are a lot of volcanoes on Venus.  We know that there are some volcanoes on the Earth too.  We know that they smell foul, that they can give off poisonous gasses and that they spit out very hot, red lava.  
Today we made our own volcano in class.
Here are the things you need to make a volcano.  You should get a tray to sit the volcano on, a small bottle and some vinegar and bread soda.  If you would like the deluxe model, you also need some red food colouring to make the lava look red, and some wash-up liquid to make bubbles.
It was very exciting watching our volcano erupting.
There seemed to be a lot of gas made in this volcano.  Was it enough to blow up a balloon?  Take a look at this video to find out:
Now that we had a balloon filled with carbon dioxide gas, we wondered whether this gas was lighter or heavier than air.  The people who thought it would be lighter than air, thought that the balloon would float when she let go (so they stood up), but those that thought it would be heavier than air and that it would just sink, they sat down on the ground.  Look at the result!  Who was right?

Next teacher blew up another balloon.  We know that we breathe in Oxygen and breathe out Carbon Dioxide gas. That means that the balloon teacher inflated was now filled with Carbon Dioxide.  We decided to drop both at the same time and see did they react in the same way?  Some of us thought that maybe one would float and one would sink.  To keep the test fair, both balloons had to be released at the same time.  Look at what happened:

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