When it’s time for the science fair, many students turn to pre-made lists of projects that have proven successful over the years.

St. Francis Xavier Elementary fifth-grader Rachel Dahl, state science fair overall winner, said that’s exactly what she didn’t want to do. Instead, she drew off of a life experience that spawned a unique interest.

“We had gone to Iceland and also Amsterdam and Belgium over the summer with my grandparents,” she said. “One of the things we saw in Iceland were geysers, and when I saw them I knew I wanted to do my science fair project on geysers because they were so interesting.”

At that point, Dahl set out to create a modified version of experiments Robert Bunson did in the 1800s.

“One of the things the signs said was that soap was used to make the geysers erupt,” she said. “I did a little bit of research, and I learned soap is a surfactant.”

Dahl said other surfactants have also been used to make geysers erupt over the years and she wanted to know which types worked and which did not.

To find out, Dahl built herself a geyser out of water, glass tubing, an Erlenmeyer flask, a hot plate, some carbon stoppers and “a lot of other things” she said without giving away too much.

Dahl wanted to figure out if salt would work to make a geyser erupt, and she said she ended up figuring out why there aren’t geysers in the ocean.

“We used 35 grams of salt per liter because that’s the composition of seawater,” she said. “The dish soap actually made the durations a little bit longer instead of the time between the durations. I actually thought it would make them both shorter.”

Dahl said she thinks she may be one of the few science fair participants who came up with a hypothesis that proved to be false but some other differences also may have set her apart.

“I think one of the reasons I might have won is because a lot of people do similar projects, but I did a project that hasn’t been done much,” she said. “I didn’t want to get a project out of a book where I would already know what happened. I wanted to see the results for myself, so I could find out the results.”

Dahl, the daughter of Travis Dahl and Jodi Ryder, has been an honor roll student, a member of fifth-grade band and choir, and she said science is one of her favorite subjects. In the future, Dahl said she wants to be an engineer, inventor and programmer.