Apologia General Science Experiment 7.2 Sinking In Ice

Apologia General Science Experiment 7.2 Sinking In Ice

We have the first edition of this book, and I noticed this experiment isn't in the new book, but a dissolving salt experiment is instead.  We might do that one too, but this is what our book has for experiment 7.2

The day BEFORE you plan on doing this experiment, you need to find a plastic bowl and fill it up half way with water and freeze the water.  The next day you can have your student/child put a rock on top of the frozen water.  You must wait at least two hours before you come back to see the results.

Here Dd is putting the rock on the ice, and then 

She placed the bowl, with rock, back in our freezer.

Two-three hours later we were surprised to see the rock had sunk down into the ice

The rock was really stuck / frozen to the ice

I told Dd to really pull the rock....and the whole chunk of ice came out!

Unlike anything else on Earth, when anything is pushing down, or weighing down on ice; the ice will melt a bit.  By being in the freezer, the melted ice (water) would refreeze again.  But, in the meantime, the rock was still continually pushing down, by it's own weight/gravity, and melting and re-freezing.  The rock ended up fitting into a little groove in the ice that the rock had made through this process.

This experiment was showing us how things can get entombed into ice, especially when it is snowing, and the snow is sealing the top, and the ice is sealing the bottom, of whatever was/is laying on the ground.  Our book used a mammoth as the example of a thing getting entombed and survive fairly intact until found.

This experiment was VERY easy, and fun.  

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