GRAND RAPIDS — The cold and snow continue to be upon us many Michiganders go ice fishing and this month our West Michigan Chevy Dealer weather kid of the month learned some science with this fun experiment. Let’s get started here’s what you need…
-ice cubes
-glass of water
-table salt
-twine or string
-food coloring
Step 1 – add half a dozen or so individual ice cubes to a cup and fill with water and any food coloring of choice if you like.
Step 2 – lay your string or twine over 1 ice cube
Step 3 – sprinkle a bit of table salt over the string and on to the ice then wait 30-60 seconds.
Step 4 – finally, gently pull the string and the ice cube should come out of the glass along with it!
Ice fishing! There we have it, but how does this work? The question is why do we use salt to melt ice? Adding salt to ice will lower the ice’s melting point. Salt causes a physical change by altering the properties and temperature of the ice cube, but if the surrounding temperature around the salt is still freezing the ice will re-freeze and attach to the string. This is an example of a reversible change. There's a couple things to keep in mind though, you need to give this reversible change enough time to re-freeze so the ice cube can attach to the string and the amount of salt you use is important. If you use too much salt the ice will melt too fast and not attach to the string or if you don’t wait long enough you won’t give the reversible change enough time to refreeze and attach to the string. You can have some science fun and make an hypothesis to see how much salt and how much time you think will work best to perfect your ice fishing!
