Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Explosive Beer Trick Explained

If you were ever half-drunk at a bar and started to wonder the physics of that explosive beer trick, now your curiosity can be set to rest.

But of course, no funding agency will pay for someone to study the neat tricks one can do with beer. So there is a more "useful" consequence to this.

Explaining this phenomenon may make you the life of your next party, but Rodriguez-Rodriguez and his colleagues studied beer in order to understand bigger-picture gaseous eruptions. One example is the Lake Nyos disaster in Cameroon. Volcanic activity under this lake dissolves carbon dioxide in the water. In 1986, the lake rapidly degassed a large amount of carbon dioxide all at once, suffocating 1,700 people and thousands more livestock. This rapid degassing event, possibly caused by a landslide, could share similar physics with an erupting beer bottle.

Like I've already said many time, a lot of things are inter-related.

Zz.

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