How come ice is clear and snow is white if they both are frozen water?
78877
The "white" is caused because snow has a great many tiny interfaces, called "phase boundaries," where air (a gas phase) meets ice (a solid phase). Every time light encounters a phase transition, it is defracted. If you've ever looked at a stick submerged partially, you've seen this--a straight stick will look like it has a bend in it right at the water's surface. Well, with snow, the tiny ice crystals, and the many small bubbles in ice (water is a bent and polar molecule, so when it freezes, it expands, making small bubbles inside), and the places where individual ice crystals begin and end--all of this scatters light all around. This makes it so that a big bunch of snow will look white. If you look at a single snowflake under a microscope, though, you will see that the crystals individally are clear.\n\nWhen it melts, there is only one phase transition, right at the surface. The light is defracted a bit, but only once--it doesn't scatter light all around like snow does.\n\nBut it can! If you've ever seen a big fountain, where the water is splashing and tumbling about, it will also look white due to phase transition. Likewise, if you make a whole bunch of tiny bubbles under water, you can scatter light and make it look white.
25339
Air temperature may be several degrees warmer than ice surface temperature. Light, including infrared or warmth, is reflected from white surfaces.\n\nThe surface of the ice will melt, slowly, during the day, but it will freeze again over night. That's one of the reasons why a snow field slowly turns into ice.
76202
Ok, water, ice, and snow are the same things. They are the same element (depending if they are different mixtures. Are you pregnant? Ive only known pregnant people to like water ir anything frozen so much. But anyways, H2O whether ice or snow, are the same exact things.
163899
essentially it is the same reason the sky is blue - rayleigh scattering inside the ice itself.  see the page below for details:\nhttp://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF7/773.html
555489
Water is a liquid and until the water get near freezing, water as it cools becomes more dense and sinks. Warmer water moves to the surface. For ice to form on a lake the temperate of all the water in the lake has to get below 39 degree F. \n\nLand on the surface may get colder but in temperate climates at certain depth the soil is always above freezing.
1183481
Pure water.  The ice will have to melt before it could boil.  Water doesn't go through sublimation
284203
Ice lowers the melting point of water, so it causes the ice to turn to liquid water and break up.  If it's *really* cold, this doesn't help.
858544
Because water expands when it freezes..\nTherefore ice is of larger volume than the water it originated from\ntherefore it is less dense..
392443
That is an interesting question.  What is snow made of?\nWater, right? Except it is water frozen in a special\nway, by accretion of little bits as the snowflake\ndrops through the atmosphere, so that snow is pretty\nrandom stuff, compared to ice which is also frozen\nwater, but which has all the water molecules nicely\nlined up which makes it transparent.  The randomness\nof snow means that when light strikes the snow it\ngets scattered in all directions, and all colors are\njumbled up, so when you look at snow all you see is\nthe jumble, which shows up as white light.  When\nit melts, it just turns into water (and usually\ndisappears into the ground) which does not have the\nkind of randomness snow has at the level of the\nwavelengths of visible light.  (Visible light\nhas wavelengths much longer than the size of molecules).\nSo, the "white" did not really exist on its own -\nit was a property of the arrangement of the water molecules\nin snow, and disappears as soon as that arrangement is\nchanged.\n\nDoes this help?
323097
Ice has a lower density than water. When water freezes, the way in which the molecules rearrange to make a solid means that they are slightly further apart than in liquid water. Since density = mass/volume, and in ice there is slightly less mass in the same volume, ice is less dense.\n\nTherefore, because of Archimedes' buoyancy principle (the upward force on an object in liquid is equal to the mass of substance *displaced* by the object), ice floats. The ice displaces a volume of water equal to the volume of ice, but that volume of water has more mass than the same volume of ice, so the upward force is greater than the mass of ice. So the ice floats.
833095
an updraft of cold air freezes water droplets into crystle. All of them are 6 sided, and EVERY ONE of them is different - amazing eh.\n\nyou can go to http://snowflakebentley.com/snowflakes.htm for cool pics and \nhttp://www.kidzworld.com/site/p1587.htm\nto see how snow is formed.
716667
Lake effect snow happens because during the summer, the lake water warms up; then, during the winter, it takes this warm water longer to cool down and freeze.  As a result, there is a period of time where the weather is cold enough for snow, but the lake isn't yet frozen.  As the winds blow over the lake towards the city, it picks up water from the lake and drops it as snow on the city.\n\nBecause the lake usually does freeze, the water is relatively colder in the spring and summer, and cold water evaporates less rapidly than warm water.  So, the air picks up relatively less water from this cold water than it would if the water were warm, so the city is somewhat protected from lake effect "rain".
913491
Well snow is white because it is a frozen sliver of moisture.We christians accept white as a sign of purity.Interestingly if you watch snow falling,no two particles ever collide(till they reach the ground)If you stand underneath falling snow and look directly up,the falling snow won't look white(try it)
167688
Imagine two big grounds , wherein one ground a big crowd gathered to hear the speach of a politician. Here each person will be moving randomly.And in the second ground same number of military men assembled for parade and standing and moving in a specified pattern.\nIf two men run through the two fields to the other side of the field, only the man running through the military men can easily reach the other end.This is because they are arranged in a certain pattern.\nIn the same way, ice cubes are traslucent because ice cubes are crystals and in crystals molicules are arranged in a definite pattern, hence it allows the light to enter and a few of light to pass through it.When this cube crushed, most of the light is reflected back, hence it appears white.
664580
snow is formed by God while ice is formed by us surely there has to be a difference
86483
Actually, Gonpatrick, the original question is quite correct: Unlike most substances, water does actually expand when it is cooled, over a narrow temperature range from about 4 degrees C to 0 degrees C (the freezing point.)  This is why water freezes from the top down: the cooler water that is closer to freezing is less dense than, and so floats above, slightly warmer water.  (Above 4 degrees C, water expands when it is heated just like most other substances.) When the water freezes it expands some more, which is why ice floats.\n\nThe reason why it does this has to do with the way water molecules are put together.  The two hydrogens and one oxygen in H2O are assembled in a triangular pattern, with one part of the molecule more positive and the other more negative.  Above 4 degrees C, the molecules move freely around each other, but when it gets close to its freezing temp, the molecules start to align themselves with the positive part of one molecule near the negative part of another, ultimately forming, when it freezes, a hexagonal pattern.  This arrangement takes up more room than when the molecules are free to move around.
241990
The real answer to this question is that that pure water is colorless both when it is liquid and is solid. The reason why all the ice cubes you see are white is that you don't have pure water. Liquids have the ability to dissolve a certain amount of gas, so the water you drink usually has a number of inert gasses dissolved in it. However, as temperature decreases, the ability of a liquid to dissolve gasses decreases and the gasses come out of solution. Now when you're making ice cubes, the top of the water usually freezes first, so all the gas that comes out of solution is trapped within the cubes, and is seen as the white color you're used to seeing. If you want clear ice cubes, try boiling your water first to remove the majority of impurities, and then freeze it. It should come out clear.