Photo credit: Alex Parrish for Virginia Tech
A disk of ice sits on a metal plate, melting. Nothing happens. Water pools beneath, forms a thin puddle. Then, without warning, the ice stirs. It slides sideways, accelerates, and then shoots across the surface like a puck on an air hockey table. This is not a magic trick, just a discovery made by a Virginia Tech team lead by Associate Professor Jonathan Boreyko and Ph.D. student Jack Tapocik. They found a way to make ice move on its own, no external push required.
Boreyko’s team got the idea from an unlikely source: Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa, a dry lakebed where boulders leave long, mysterious trails in the cracked earth. For decades, these “sailing stones” puzzled scientists. In 2014, Scripps Institute of Oceanography Professor Richard Norris solved the mystery. Rainwater would pool on the hard ground, freeze, and then partially melt. A gentle breeze would nudge the ice rafts, drag the rocks along. Boreyko’s group took this natural phenomenon and turned it into something more controlled, more deliberate. They wanted ice that could move without wind, relying only on the physics of melting.
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The crew applied a water-repellent spray to the herringbone pattern, expecting the ice to glide faster. Instead, the water-repellent surface drained extra meltwater from the grooves, leaving the ice trapped on the ridges. The meltwater continued to flow, but the ice could not get a ride. This unexpected result revealed the slingshot effect’s true cause: the puddle forming ahead of the ice, not just the flow beneath it. That mismatch in surface tension is what makes the ice fly.
Boreyko sees practical applications. Defrosting, for one, could be faster and more efficient. Current methods use heat or manual scraping, but a surface that propels melting ice could make the process more energy-efficient in freezers or aircraft de-icing systems. The bigger idea, though, is energy generation. If the herringbone pattern were shaped into a circular track, the melting ice could spin continuously. Attach magnets to the ice, and you’ve got a spinning system that could generate electricity.
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