Water Breaks Down Rocks

I am surrounded by rocks, and you might not think rocks are really that exciting, but they are. Rocks come in all different shapes and sizes. Some rocks are bigger, and some rocks are smaller. And you may not believe it, but sand is actually a rock. It is a rock. They are really tiny rocks that have been broken down from bigger rocks. So what in the world could be strong enough to break down a rock like this? I cannot do it. What can? Believe it or not, it is just plain, ordinary water. Hi, I am Jared. Welcome to Fun Science Demos. And the big idea today is that water, when it freezes or rains or snows, that water helps break down rocks. So how can water break down a rock? I mean, if I put this rock in this container, and cover it with water, how is the water actually going to break down that rock? I could sit here all day. Well, through science we discovered that it actually takes a lot of time, and something else. And that something else is freezing. When water freezes, it expands, and nothing can stop it when that water is expanding. For example, take a look at this glass bottle. I filled it with water. Now, if I were to put a cap on this and put it in the freezer, that water would expand and break the bottle into lots of little pieces. It is pretty dangerous, and we do not want to do that. So, we want to come up with a demonstration that is a whole lot safer that you can try. We are going to show you three safer ways that shows the power of water to break things and crack things when it freezes. The simplest way is an egg. Take a normal raw chicken egg. I do not want to hard boil it, because I want all that liquid inside to freeze. And what is that liquid inside going to do when it freezes? It expands. It gets bigger. And when it gets bigger, things break and crack. Take a look at this egg. All I did was put it in the freezer. And when I checked it the next day, the shell had cracked and broke. Here is another safer and tastier way to show you the power of water to crack and break things. This, believe it or not, is a water balloon, a yellow water balloon. I filled it with water, and then I coated it with a special chocolate syrup that forms a nice chocolatey shell, a hard shell. I put that in the freezer. When that water froze, it expanded. It got bigger, and it cracked that chocolate shell all around it. I tried it with a red water balloon, and guess what? When that water froze, it cracked that chocolate shell all around it. It is pretty simple to do, maybe a little bit messy. You need special chocolate syrup that turns into a hard shell when you put it on, and a water balloon. You are also going to want to have a little container to catch the mess as it sort of drops off and drips off of my balloon. So all I am going to do is hold this up and let it ooze down to cover my balloon. Spin it. It is okay if I make a mess. And you can see how the chocolate shell covers the balloon. I want to keep smearing it on until the entire balloon is all covered. Now how do I freeze this thing without making a big mess? Well I take a toothpick, stick it through the top part of the balloon, and in your freezer there are shelves. You can slide the toothpick up the shelf, spin it, and hang it there until the water inside freezes and breaks your chocolate shell. Our last safe way to show you the power of water to crack and break things is using plaster. It is harder than an eggshell. It is harder than a chocolate shell. It is almost as hard as rock. And we are going to make our own. You are going to need some plastic cups, paper cups, styrofoam cups, it does not matter what kind of cup you use, a water balloon, and pretty much I am going to walk you through how to make this work. So I am using a red cup. And the problem with this is that if I mix up my plaster and I try to put my water balloon inside and pour the plaster over top, the water balloon will actually want to float on the top. And that is not going to work. So I have to come up with a way to keep the water balloon down inside the cup. That is what I am going to do right now. All I am going to do is use a thumbtack to poke a hole right in the center of the cup. And once I get my hole started, I am going to use my pencil to make the hole bigger. I twist and push, and now I have a decent size hole. The next trick is how do I get the neck of this balloon through that hole. And that is where a twist tie comes in. There is a little piece of metal and these are used to just tie together baggies and things like that. And I can actually push this right through the neck of my balloon. Got it through the neck. Twist it a little bit to make sure it holds. And now scrunch the end. And I am going to poke it through the end of my cup. Pull it up. The neck of my balloon is now through. Take the twist tie off. And now, this is hard to see, because the balloon wants to stretch. The balloon wants to stretch. So I want to make sure it is not coming down all the way. So I am going to pull this up just a little bit higher. Stretch it down a little more. I can reach up inside and feel easier than I can see. Once I have it where I am happy with it, I am going to take a piece of tape. I am going to tape the bottom. I like to use two pieces of tape so the plaster does not come out the bottom hole. Now, I have a balloon inside my cup that is not going to come out or float when I pour in the plaster. So now I have to mix up my plaster. To stir it, I am going to use my popsicle stick. I guess you could use your pencil. And I have a cup of plaster. Now I need to add enough water to make this about as thick as that chocolate syrup we used earlier. If I put too much in, it is going to get too liquidy, too loose. If I put too little in, it is going to be too stiff. So I am going to do this little by little. I dump it in and I stir. So I have my plaster the way I want it. You can see it is pretty much as loose as that chocolate syrup. Now the fun part. I get to pour it all over my balloon. So I have my cup. What I am going to do is pour this down in. And I can pour it right on top of my balloon. That will help center the balloon. Now the next part is pretty important. I am going to turn this. And what I am going to do is try to show you. I want to try and keep that balloon centered inside the cup. So I am going to use my popsicle stick to poke it around and center it in there. If you see your balloon come up to the top, that means you have not taped it down close enough to the bottom. The nice thing about plaster is it dries pretty quickly. So you can just use your popsicle stick to hold it down until it dries and holds it. And then let go. It takes a few minutes, maybe even up to an hour for this plaster to get hard enough to take a scissors and cut away the cup. You can see here, well actually I have two different blocks. You can see the actual ribs or outlines of my cup that when I peeled it away. So what are these two things? Well this first one you can see the neck of my balloon peeking out the bottom. And it was right in the center of this block. I stuck the whole thing in the freezer. And look what happened. As that water froze it expanded and it cracked and broke through this plaster. The water was so strong it could break through this hard plaster. What about this one? It is not broken at all. It looks like there is a balloon in the center too. I filled this balloon with air instead of water. And the air, it did not expand when I put it in the freezer. It did not crack anything. The power of water to break rocks when it freezes. It is amazing to think that plain ordinary water has the power to crack and break rocks when it freezes. Scientists who study rocks are called geologists. If you want to learn more about geology check out our links in the video description. Science is so cool and so amazing. Thanks for watching.