Inside Look at How Ice Melts
A new computer simulation shows that frozen water molecules, when heated up, vibrate until they start to spin. The swiveling motion causes the Mickey-Mouse-shaped particles to break free of their ice crystal home, bump into neighboring molecules and start a chain reaction of melting.
David van der Spoel, a computational chemist at Uppsala University in Sweden, said his team's computerized model is based on an actual 2006 experiment in which a laser melted ice, but could not provide the detail that the simulation offers.
"We want to see what’s happening on an atomic level ... but experiments don’t show that detailed structure," van der Spoel told LiveScience. "We’ve done that here with computer simulations, added the picture of how something moves from solid to liquid on a realistic time scale."
