Making Snow Volcano Explosions

I had been promising the boys for a while now that we'd make snow volcanoes and they reminded me over the weekend that we had not yet done that.



 I offered to go outside with them and make some snowcanoes as we called them.  We donned our winter gear and I packed up a plastic bag with some baking soda and a squirt bottle filled with white vinegar that we had turned red using some food coloring.

We found a mound of snow and hollowed out a small hole for the mouth of our volcano.

We poured in the baking soda:

adding the baking soda to our cavern 

Then we added the red vinegar to the baking soda and watched our lava start foaming red.

We got lots of foaming "lava" but our hole was so deep and large that it didn't foam over the sides.

They begged to try again so Alec and I went to get more supplies while Ian and Evan made a new volcano with a much smaller crater in the center.  We again made a huge foaming lava pit but found that we just could not get it to flow down the sides.  They didn't care and thought it was still pretty cool.  They then destroyed both volcanoes and had the walls cave in under the pressure of the explosion.  They stomped on them and tracked red "lava" around the hill claiming it was blood and bodies.

squirting in the red vinegar 

It bubbled and foamed 

Our second attempt was still flat but they thought it was great anyway 
It was a really fun winter science experiment! 

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