Moving wire though ice

Welcome to day 3 of ‘ice science week‘, so far we have made frost, and looked at freezing.

Today we are going to try a cool science trick where you can make wire move through ice. Ice usually needs to be warmed up to melt, but you can also make it melt by adding pressure to it.

You’ll need:

Thin wire, we used fishing rod wire.

A block of ice

1 or 2 weights.

How to move a wire through ice

Basically, you need to place the wire over the ice and add weights to it, so the weights pull the wire down on the ice.

We didn’t have any weights, so we suspended the ice above a bench and used a heavy griddle pan as a weight.

We added a little bit of salt over the wire, to speed up the melting process.

You can see here how the wire has melted into the ice, I am suspending the ice in the air by holding the wire

A much neater way to demonstrate this would be to use a smaller piece of ice and place on the top of a bottle and place wire with a small weight on either side over the top. 

I quite like my makeshift version, though.

Why does this work?

When water freezes, it expands, as the molecules arrange themselves in a very ordered arrangement which takes up more space than when the molecules are free.

The wire adds pressure to the ice under it, which melts the ice a little bit, when the wire moves down, the water on the top refreezes, this continues as the wire moves through the ice.

Last Updated on February 17, 2023 by Emma Vanstone