Ice cubes are solid blocks. You can slide them across the table. Or bounce them off each other. They float if you put them in water. One word you would not use to describe them is – sticky. Unless you were unlucky enough to lick a frozen pole on your playground when you were a kid, and found your tongue stuck to the pole. That bad luck happened because the liquid on your tongue froze, and as it froze, it stuck to the icy pole.
So, the trick to making ice sticky is to get it in contact with liquid and then make that liquid freeze. You can do this by using one of the properties of ice. Ice melts under pressure. If you press flat sides of two ice cubes together, the pressure will make the ice melt right where the cubes are touching. But if you hold the two cubes together for about a minute, that liquid will freeze again. The new frozen liquid will act like glue – just like it did between the tongue and the icy pole.
You can let go of one of the cubes you’ve been pressing together. It will be stuck to the one you are still holding. You have turned ice into water and back to ice again. And in the process, you have made two ice cubes stick together.
if you like this type of activity, check out the STEM books at http://www.LookUnderRocks.com
The image above is from the video posted here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmJ5LrJuZ0w
