Mixing Mercury & Gallium| JeyJey

Indexé : 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Today, I'm going to mix liquid mercury and liquid gallium together because both of these metals possess the unique ability to form compounds with other metals. Here, for example, it looks as though the mercury is consuming the gold foil. Or here, gallium and aluminum are placed together making the aluminum extremely brittle. Now, I'm genuinely quite curious about what happens when I mix these two metals which eagerly form compounds with other metals together.

[00:00:21]Using a quick and simple approach, I pour the gallium into the mercury, mix the two, and transfer the liquid metal into a glass container. Here, it's clearly visible that gallium floats on top. This makes perfect sense as mercury is twice as dense causing the lighter gallium to drift like an iceberg on the surface. At the same time, the mercury appears mirror smooth and clean, whereas gallium has an uneven and irregular surface. This is because gallium forms dull oxides with the oxygen in the air, whereas mercury hardly reacts with air at all. What one also observes is that neither of the two metals reacts as violently with each other as was the case with mercury plus gold and gallium plus aluminum. Even after nearly 15 hours together, there is macroscopically no change. When pouring it into a beaker, it's noticeable that part of the gallium has solidified again. That makes sense because the melting point of gallium is around 30° C and the lab is significantly colder. This behavior is a strong indication that the two metals are either very slightly alloyed or not alloyed at all since the melting point of an alloy would be lower than the melting point of the highest melting metal within the alloy. Long story short, in an alloy containing a multi-percentage range of mercury and gallium, a solid metal block should not form.