Last weekend, our beautiful and powdery snow turned to ice. Freezing rain fell from the sky for a couple of days, leaving a treacherous layer of ice on top of the snow everywhere. We don't get snow often, especially the snow storm we just had. When we do though, history seems to have a way of repeating itself and it always ends with an ice storm. We stayed inside for about 48 hours once the freezing rain began to fall (with the exception of me going out to check in on the chickens, bring them bits of food to keep them somewhat happy and break their ice water up) since the walkway, roads, ground and everything was way to dangerous to even attempt. Because we don't get this type of weather often, our cities become pretty immobilized for the duration of it. Other areas of the country are used to snow and ice, so they use de-icer chemicals and/or salt to keep the roads safe for drivers. As an experiment, we decided to test the waters (or ice) to see how well salt really works at thawing out ice. I have a book that had just the experiment in it as well so we used it as a guideline and got to work. As it turns out, the ice with salt on it melted a couple hours faster than the ice with no salt on it. Very interesting!
The ice on the left has the salt on it. Pictures taken about an hour after each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment