Ice water

Chemistry Level 2

If you fill a glass to the brim with ice water and the ice melts, what will happen?

The water level will drop slightly as the ice melts The glass will overflow as the ice turns into water The level of water in the glass will remain unchanged as the ice melts

Leela Venkatesan by Leela Venkatesan , 16, USA

This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and, finally, (c) loading the non-javascript version of this page . We're sorry about the hassle.

1 solution

Leela Venkatesan
Apr 29, 2018

One interesting property of water is that it achieves maximum density as a liquid, not as a solid. So, ice is less dense than water and floats. When it melts, it becomes more dense. More mass per unit volume means the level of the liquid drops slightly.

0 Helpful 0 Interesting 0 Brilliant 0 Confused

What does "ice water" mean? If a cup is filled with solid ice, yes, the level of "water" will drop, as ice has a lower density than water. However, if a cup is mostly water and has ice floating in it, the water level will stay the same as the ice melts. To see this, consider a cube of ice floating in a cup of water. The volume the ice is under water is the same volume of water that equals the weight of the ice cube. Hence, as the cube melts, it simply changes to water in that volume, and so the water level does not change.

Michael Mendrin - 3 years, 1 month ago

1 pending report

Vote up reports you agree with

×

Problem Loading...

Note Loading...

Set Loading...