RISING AND DRIPPING (Amazing Science Games and Experiments)

Materials Required:

1. Small cardboard box
2. 2 glasses
3. Thick cotton thread strings
4. 8 nails
5. Epsom salt

Procedure:

1. Remove the lid of the cardboard box and place one glass each on both sides of the box. But be sure that the box is below the level of the glasses. Take four thick thread strings of cotton. Putting them together, tie one nail each
   with the two ends of thread strings. The length should be such that passing over the box the strings can reach the bottoms of the two glasses.
2. Now, prepare a saturated solution of the Epsom salts i.e., mix as much of these salts in the water as can get dissolved into it.
3. Fill both the glasses with this saturated solution. Immerse each nail tied, to the strings, in the two glasses and pass the strings over the box. After a while, you will see that the solution is slowly travelling along the strings on both the sides and the droplets getting collected in the middle. This is how the formation of stalactites starts.
4. Again, when enough solution gets collected there, it starts dripping on the floor of the box and the drops thus collected there start mounting upwards. This exactly is the process of the formation of stalagmites.

This is what happens:

The process of rising up and dripping down of the drops of the solution continues unchecked. With the passage of time, the water part of the solution evaporates leaving behind the solid salt. Similarly, stalactites and stalagmites are formed
in Nature.