Kind: captions
Language: en
Why is ice slippery?
Ice slippery? Oh, I don't know. I
couldn't tell you that. Um, but you
skate on it.
I skate on it, but uh
you know that it feels pretty slippery,
doesn't it?
It does feel slippery, but you would
feel a different slipperiness to me
because I skate for a living.
Uhhuh.
Because the the ratio
ratio of
friction versus air on water, frozen
water.
So, I'm here on an ice rink in uh
Sydney, and I've been asking people,
"Why is ice slippery?" Now, a lot of
them kind of have the right idea. They
say there's a layer of water on top of
the ice, but they don't know why. They
think it's just because the sun's out or
because it's warm in Sydney and the ice
melts. So, I wanted to know why ice is
slippery.
Where the freezing meets the um less
than freezing state, it becomes a
liquid. So, it's the liquid on top of
the the frozen state that makes it
slippery
because it gets wet.
Because it gets wet. But I mean, like
down here, it's not so wet, right?
Yeah.
No, it's not.
Well, isn't it I mean, that's not It's
pretty frozen.
Yeah.
But it's still slippery here.
The water, for instance, on here will
lubricate and you'll have a better
sliding surface than you will with the
dry ice.
It's like lubrication or something. I
don't know. lubrication
because the sun has heated up the ice
which causes it to melt. The water
particles become unstable on the top,
widen, causes it to be wet.
But would the ice be slippery even if
there was no sun?
Uh, depends on the actual heat. It's not
the sun's rays that does it. It's the
actual temperature. The real reason is
when you step on the ice, you compress
it a bit and that decreases its melting
point. And so we get a thin layer of
water that you can glide along. That's
what makes ice slippery.
If you were to slide on your belly or
across the water bit, you'd obviously
get very wet, but you'd slide a lot
further than you would on the dry
section here.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Have you tried that?
In Brisbane during the pack down of the
event, um I took uh one of our
inflatable tubes and I didn't think I
was going to get very far, but because
the ice was melting, I managed to slide
60 m.
Wow. uh from a from a 10 yard run up, I
slid 60 meters the whole way across the
rink.
That's pretty impressive.
I was I was very happy with that. I
didn't I didn't think I was going to get
that far.
But it doesn't actually have to be warm
out. It can be freezing cold out and you
still get the same slippery effect
because it's based on pressure, not the
temperature of the outside air.
You're a bad skater.
I'm a bad skater.
Yeah. You want to go? Let's have a race.
No.
You want to race me? No.
Let's go.