• Question: why is ice slippery?

    Asked by hrdrewett to Alison, Artem, Caroline, John, Gunther on 14 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Alison Graham

      Alison Graham answered on 14 Jun 2012:

      Great question!

    • Photo: Artem Evdokimov

      Artem Evdokimov answered on 14 Jun 2012:

      Several reasons 🙂
      The theory of pressure melting was all the rage for two centuries, but it has been gradually replaced/augmented with more sophisticated theories…

      For one, surface of ice has a thin layer of water-like substance (not quite water in conventional sense) on it even when it’s very cold. There are various cool reasons for that 🙂

      Also, ice is very even (microscopically) since it forms from liquid and liquid surface is very smooth

      http://lptms.u-psud.fr/membres/trizac/Ens/L3FIP/Ice.pdf has a very detailed reasoning for this question!

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