What is Melting?

What is melting? Today’s experiment is very simple. We made some ice cubes and then put them in different places to watch them melt.

You can use standard ice cubes or any shaped moulds you have around the house.

What you need

• Ice cubes of the same size
• Containers for the ice cubes.

Instructions

• Place each ice cube in a container.
• Put the ice cubes in different places, we put ours outside, inside and in the fridge.
• Time how long it takes each to melt.

First we discussed what makes ice melt and predicted where the cubes would melt the fastest.

Can you design a table to record your results?

What is melting?

Melting is when a substance changes from a solid to a liquid. Water freezes to ice when it is cooled to below 0 degrees, when ice is warmed to above 0 degree it turns back into water.

To expand this experiment you could try the ice cubes in more places, or observe and photograph at 10 minute intervals.

Recording the temperature in each place would also be useful.

Our Results

The first time we did this, the cube outside melted faster than the one inside. We decided there could have been a few reasons for this, one being that the outside ice might have been smaller than the inside one, or the weather had an impact.

We tried again on a different day and found as expected the cube inside melted faster than the one outside.

More fun

What do you think would happen if you covered your ice cubes with bubble wrap or foil? Can you investigate?

Another easy investigation is to use a pipette to drip warm and cold water over ice cubes to see how that speeds up the melting process.

If you enjoyed this activity try one of our other ice experiments.