why ice cubes float to the top of water

Question

Shouldn’t the ice cubes be more dense than the water because they’re the solid form of water?

In: 0

Answer 1

Water molecules have this odd “V” shape to them. When they’re in liquid form, they can mash together really closely. Picture all the ways two “V”s can be mashed together.

But when water freezes, all those “V” shapes connect up into something that looks more like cubes. Cubes can do things like stack, but they have a lot of open space in the middle of the cube. That means the same number of water molecules wind up taking up more space when they’re frozen than they do when they’re not.

The same mass but a bigger volume means ice is less dense, and floats.