Underwater Volcano

What You Need

• Large pot
• Cold water
• Ice cubes
• Spoon
• Clean, empty baby food jar
• Hot tap water
• Red food coloring
• Marbles

What to Do
Fill the pot with cold water and put in some ice cubes. When the water is sufficiently cold, fish out the ice cubes with the spoon. Fill the baby food jar three-quarters full with hot tap water and add five drops of red food coloring. Stir well. Add five or six marbles to give the jar some weight. Place the bottle in the bottom of the pot.

What Happens
The red water slowly erupts from the jar toward the surface of the water. When the red water cools, it settles at the bottom of the pot.

Why It Works
Heat rises. Hot water is lighter than cold water because the molecules in hot water are farther apart than the molecules in cold water.

Bizarre Facts

• Pumice, a natural glass that comes from lava, is widely used to remove calluses.
• In Reykjavik, Iceland, most people heat their homes with water piped from volcanic hot springs.
• When Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in 1815, it released six million times more energy than an atomic bomb and killed over twelve thousand people.
• In 1963, an underwater eruption began forming the island of Surtsey in the North Atlantic Ocean. After the last eruption of lava in 1967, the island covered more than one square mile.
• History's most famous volcanic eruption, Mount Vesuvius, took place in 79 C.E. and destroyed the Italian towns of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae. Pompeii remained untouched beneath the ash deposits for almost seventeen hundred years.
• The word volcano comes from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire who lived beneath a volcanic island called Vulcano off the coast of Italy.
• The Voyager mission's photograph of Io, Jupiters third-largest moon, showed ten active volcanoes, some of them erupting—making Io more volcanically active than Earth.

Miracle on Bali
Besakih Temple, the holiest temple on the island of Bali, sits at the foot of the Gunung Agung volcano. On this holy spot, the Eka Dasa Rudra festival is held once every one hundred years—meaning that all the traditions needed to prepare for the festival must be passed down from one generation to the next. On the last day of the celebration in 1963, for the first time in centuries, the volcano erupted, killing thousands of people and sending lava coursing over eastern Bali. Miraculously, Besakih Temple remained untouched.

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