Author: Abbey Perreault / Source: Atlas Obscura
In your average lab, pouring a bowl of cereal may be a violation of protocol. But at the University of Sydney, researchers Itai Einav and François Guillard have found good reason to bring breakfast fare to the lab bench.
Studying or simulating natural phenomena from within a laboratory can be difficult. “We don’t have room for a 100-meter dam in our laboratories,” says Dr. Einav, a professor of geomechanics. Instead, the researchers use puffed rice cereal as a surrogate material for naturally-occurring dry snow and rocks—all of which fall under the category of brittle, porous media.
“That’s the scientific name,” says Dr. Einav, “but I call it crunchy material.” Puffed rice is a good stand-in, since, like snow and rock, cereal breaks under pressure and degrades in fluid.
This isn’t the scientists’ first rodeo with Rice Krispies, which, if you didn’t know, are called Rice Bubbles in Australia. (During a previous study, Dr. Einav tells me, he referred to his American colleague as Mr. Rice Krispies, who reciprocated by calling him Mr. Rice Bubbles.) But until this point, the researchers had worked primarily with dry cereal, which is helpful when it comes to modeling dry snow or rock crumbling under pressure. But some collapse events involve water—such as those that occur in ice shelves, sinkholes, and rockfill dams when they’re exposed to large amounts of liquid and high pressure. Studying these is challenging, because they happen incredibly slowly and at such large scale.
That’s where the milk comes in. Adding it to cereal, the researchers found, could simulate these collapses in a sped-up, scaled-down way.
To create the collapse, the researchers poured the cereal…
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