The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is ...

When a two-week, high-pressure window of cold, clear weather froze lakes south of Anchorage, adventurous skaters, including our writer, were ready. By Elaine Glusac I’d been waiting for months when I ...

The journey to unravel the mysteries of ice’s slipperiness began with Michael Faraday’s groundbreaking proposal in the 1850s. Faraday suggested that a thin liquid water layer on the surface of ice was ...

For nearly two centuries, students have been taught that ice is slippery because pressure or friction melts a thin surface layer into water. But a team at Saarland University has now overturned this ...

The Saarland researchers reveal that the slipperiness of ice is driven by electrostatic forces, not melting. Water molecules in ice are arranged in a rigid crystal lattice. Each molecule has a ...