Man Wearing Mentos Suit Dropped in Tank of Diet Coke

To promote his upcoming series on FYI TV, EpicMealTime creator Harley Morenstein shared a clip of a guy wearing a Mentos-covered suit getting dropped in a dunk tank full of Diet Coke.

I'd watch that show.

So, what makes Mentos and Diet Coke react this way? Dr. Tonya Coffey of Appalachian State University and her physics students published a paper on the phenomenon in the American Journal of Physics. Daven Hiskey explained it for us last year:

IT'S ALL ABOUT TEXTURE

Coffey and company discovered that the ingredients in the Mentos and Diet Coke and, more importantly, the structure of the Mentos, allow carbon dioxide bubbles to form extremely rapidly. When this happens fast enough, you get a nice Diet Coke fountain. (It’s not just Diet Coke and Mentos that react; other carbonated beverages will also readily respond to the addition of Mentos.)

Each Mentos candy has thousands of small pores on its surface which disrupt the polar attractions between water molecules, creating thousands of ideal nucleation sites for the gas molecules to congregate. In non-science speak, this porous surface creates a lot of bubble growth sites, allowing the carbon dioxide bubbles to rapidly form on the surface of the Mentos. (If you use a smooth surfaced Mentos candy, you won’t get nearly same the reaction.) The buoyancy of the bubbles and their growth will eventually cause the bubbles to leave the nucleation site and rise to the surface of the soda. Bubbles will continue to form on the porous surface and the process will repeat, creating a nice, foamy geyser.

In addition to that, the gum arabic and gelatin ingredients of the Mentos, combined with the potassium benzoate, sugar or (potentially) aspartame in diet sodas, also help in this process. In these cases, the ingredients end up lowering the surface tension of the liquid, allowing for even more rapid bubble growth on the porous surface of the Mentos—higher surface tension would make it a more difficult environment for bubbles to form. (Compounds like gum arabic that lower surface tension are called “surfactants”).

Diet sodas produce a bigger reaction than non-diet sodas because aspartame lowers the surface tension of the liquid much more than sugar or corn syrup will. You can also increase the effect by adding more surfactants to the soda when you add the Mentos, like adding a mixture of dishwasher soap and water.

SIZE MATTERS

Another factor that contributes to the size of the geyser is how rapidly the object causing the foaming sinks in the soda. The faster it sinks, the faster the reaction can happen, and a faster reaction creates a bigger geyser; a slower reaction may release the same amount of foam overall, but will also create a much smaller geyser. This is another reason Mentos works so much better than other similar confectioneries: The candies are fairly dense objects and tend to sink rapidly in the soda. If you crush the Mentos, so it doesn’t sink much at all, you won’t get a very dramatic reaction.

The temperature of the soda also factors into geyser size. Gases are less soluble in liquids with a higher temperature, so the warmer your soda is, the bigger your Mentos-induced geyser will be. This is because the gases want to escape the liquid, so when you drop the Mentos in, the reaction happens faster.

Daven Hiskey runs Today I Found Out. EpicMealTime clip via LaughingSquid.