Dancing ice

What makes ice float? And how can you make it dance? Try this activity to find out.
What you need
To do this activity you will need the following:

a tall glass orplastic container

some vegetable oil
ice (try adding some food colouring to make it easier to see).

What to do
1. Fill the glass with oil.
2. Drop a block of ice into the glass. The ice should float in the middle of the oil.
3. Watch the ice as it melts.
You will find drops form on the ice, then drop off to fall slowly through the oil. As the
drops form and fall, the ice will rock from side to side and move up and down.
Whats happening
This activity is all about density. The density of a material is how much a given
volume of that material weighs. For example, one cubic metre of liquid water weighs
1000 kg, so it has a density of 1000 kg/m.
When you drop an object into a liquid, it feels the forces of:

gravity, which pulls it down

buoyancy, which pushes it up.

When you drop something into a liquid, it displaces some of the liquid (pushes it out
of the way). An object placed in a liquid feels an upward force equal to the weight of
the liquid it is displacing. This force is called buoyancy.

If the weight of the object is less than the weight of the liquid it is displacing, it will
float. If it is greater, it will sink. Another way to say this is that if the object is less
dense than the liquid, it will float, but if it is denser it will sink. This is even true for
liquids. Liquid water is denser than oil, so the oil floats on the water.
Water is weird stuff. We dont normally notice it, because water is so common, but
water does some things that almost no other chemical will do. One of the ways water
is strange is that it is less dense as a solid than as a liquid.
Ice and vegetable oil have almost the same density, around 920 kg/m, so a block of
ice dropped into oil will barely move. As the water melts, it turns into denser, liquid
water. The water tends to stick to the ice for a while before it drops off. If there is
enough liquid water on the ice, then the density of the ice and water together is greater
than the oil, so they will sink. Once the drop of water falls off the ice, the ice floats up
again.
Its a good thing that ice floats on water. In winter, some rivers and lakes freeze on the
surface. If ice was denser than water, then the rivers and lakes would freeze from the
bottom up, which would kill plants growing in them and starve most of the fish and
other marine life.
Discover more about Antarctica in Polar eyes.