And it goes up and up and up and up…How far does it go? When does it pop? Where would it land? Anyone know the farthest a regular balloon has traveled just from someone letting it go?
It will rise until its density matches that of the air - or until the envelope can’t withstand the pressure and ruptures (height of this obviously depends on the construction of the envelope). Scientific balloons regularly reach altitudes over 100,000’.
Where the wind takes it. Antarctica is popular for balloon experiments because it has winds that slowly circle the south pole; a balloon can thus stay aloft for weeks without straying too far.
From this site:
When I was a kid in suburban Baltimore in the 50’s and 60’s, we would have contests at school: we would attach a card to a balloon with our names and addresses, and instructions to the finder to please mail the card to us. The balloon that went the most distance was the winner. I had a couple returned from Pennsylvania… one person had one returned from Massachusetts…one person had one returned from Newfoundland… but the winner, in all the years I participated, was the balloon that went to Ireland… unbelievable, but this truely happened.
We used to let the balloons go in elementary school too although no one ever returned my card. I was surprised one day when I was sitting next to our pond in Louisiana too see a cluster of regular balloons slowly come down not very far away. They were fom school kids in Illinois which is about 800 miles or so I think. I wrote them back.
[slight hijack]
Don’t some environmentalists whine about doing this? They claim that the balloons, I don’t know, clog up whale’s blowholes or something…
Yeah. My elementary school stopped doing it in the late '80s for environmental reasons. At least mine got to be one of the last classes to do it, although we must not have had very good balloons since nobody managed to make it past Maryland from South-Central Pennsylvania in the three or four years that we did it.