1,500 coke geysers

As published in The Straits Times
06 Aug 2010

By Lester Kok

BILLED as the Great Singapore Mass Activity, the record-breaking event saw 1,430 Cola-Mentos geysers fired up into the sky, all at once, on Friday.

The effort by the students, teachers and alumni of Punggol Secondary School was good enough for the Singapore Book of Records - for creating the most number of simultaneous Cola-Mentos geysers here.

The educational aim: To create more awareness of science. All the participants had to do was to drop Mentos sweets into a 1.5 litre bottle of diet cola.

The result was a metre-tall fountain which lasted about three seconds.

Discovered about 10 years ago, the cola-geyser has been experimented on by various people, from television hosts to scientists.

Invited to explain the science behind the cola-geyser phenomenon at the event, was Associate Professor David Lee Butler from the Nanyang Technological University, who said that Mentos, which has many microscopic holes on its surface, when dropped into cola, provides a good surface for bubbles to form easily.

Read also: Cola Geysers in Punggol!