How to make a Blizzard Lava Lamp
In this festive STEAMWORKS blog, we tell you how to make a lava lamps that looks like you’ve caught a blizzard in a bottle!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from STEAMWORKS! As we finish another year of fun primary school STEM workshops, we like to look back at our favourite experiments of the year. One of them is our lava lamps!
Our lava lamp experiment is a great way to introduce primary school students to key chemistry concepts. But is there any way we can make it more festive and wintry? For this special school holidays experiment, we’re going to help you make your own snow blizzard lava lamp.
What you need
To make your snow blizzard lava lamp, you will need:
- A small bottle or jar
- Small pot or jug
- Baby oil
- Water
- White acrylic paint
- Vitamin C tables
Unlike our normal lava lamps, we’re going to use baby oil. This is because baby oil is colourless, and it will help our lava lamp look more like it is snow. Vegetable oil or another cooking oil will also work if you don’t have baby oil, but the end result might look different.
If you can, avoid flavoured vitamin C tablets. These usually contain food colouring which will effect the colour of your snow.
If you want to some shine to your blizzard lava lamp, add a small amount of glitter too!
1) Pour baby oil into your jar
Pour your baby oil into a nice clean bottle or jar of your choice to about half way.
Tip: try to find a smaller bottle or jar to do this experiment, so you can have oil left over to do it again!
2) Mix your water and paint
In your small pot or jug, mix a little bit of white paint with some water. Keep stirring until the two are totally mixed.
3) Pour water and paint into the jar
Pour a small amount of the mixture into your bottle or jar – about 2 to 3cm in the bottom, leaving some empty space at the top of the bottle. You’ll see the water and paint sink right to the bottom, and the oil sit on top.
Why haven’t the oil and water mixed? – Water and oil have different densities, or the mass it takes up in a certain space. Water is denser than oil, so it sinks to the bottom. Oil is less dense, and sits above it.
The two cannot be mixed, so they sit separately in the bottle.
4) Break up your Vitamin C tablet
Break up, crumble or snap your Vitamin C tablet into a few smaller pieces.
5) Drop the tablet in and watch!
Drop in the tablet into the jar and see a blizzard emerge in your jar!
What’s happening???
Vitamin C tablets contain bicarbonate of soda. As well as being a regular cooking ingredient, it excitingly reacts with water – meaning they combine to make something new. The reaction makes a gas called carbon dioxide, which tries to escape from the top of the bottle.
When a liquid like water reacts, it might fizz or bubble. STEM experts like to call this effervescence.
Water with CO2 in it rises through the oil, still not mixing. Because the water is stained white by the paint, it looks like snow! Once it rises to the top, the CO2 is released into the air, and the water sinks back down again.
What should I try next?
If you want to take this experiment to the next level, change up some of the steps. See what happens if you don’t break up the tablet, or you add more or less water.
This can all change how long the reaction lasts, or how vigorous the reaction is.
