
No One Is Quite Sure Why Ice Is Slippery
WorldBy Paulina Rowińska1/25/20261 min read
A thin, watery layer coating the surface of ice is what makes it slick. Despite a great deal of theorizing over the centuries, though, it isn't entirely clear why that layer forms.
They intuited that molecules near the surface behave differently from those deep within the ice. Ice is a crystal, which means each water molecule is locked into a periodic lattice. However, at the s
