What Would Happen If Niagara Falls Were Funneled Through a Straw

How to Turn a Straw Into a Weapon of Mass Destruction

In their never-ending quest to answer questions no sane person should ever act on, Randall Munroe of xkcd and Henry Reich of MinutePhysics tackle this extremely normal thought experiment: What if you tried to funnel all of Niagara Falls through a straw? Spoiler: You’d break every law of physics, several international treaties, and eventually, the planet. See, the flow rate of Niagara Falls is about 100,000 cubic feet per second. A normal straw? …

Running Niagara Falls Through a Drinking Straw

A truly ridiculous scenario was submitted to the What If? series (previously at Neatorama). What would happen if you tried to send all the water going over Niagara Falls through a straw? That's 50,000 to 100,000 cubic feet of water per second! Randall Munroe and Henry Reich gamely explain why you can't do this with some of the finer points of fluid dynamics, and how this attempt would trigger some bizarre effects, like water "boiling" under pres…

What Would Happen If Niagara Falls Were Funneled Through a Straw

As part of their ongoing “What If?” series, Randall Munroe of xkcd and Henry Reich of MinutePhysics answered a viewer’s question as to what would happen if a person tried to defy all physics and funnel Niagara Falls through a straw. The answer was that not much good would happen and a lot of people would be very pissed off. This question comes from David, who asks: what would happen if one tried to  funnel Niagara Falls through a straw? The sho…