“Does ice melt faster in saltwater or freshwater?”

Hi there, Rhea here speaking from all the PYP 4’s.

I will be sharing a wonderful science experiment we did to test our hypothesis from our research question, which is “Does ice melt faster in saltwater or freshwater?”

Now I will walk you through all the preparations before the experiment. I bet you think this is useless but it’s not; without preparation you would not be here right now reading this.

First we were split into groups. Next we had to discuss all the materials that we needed for this breathtaking experiment. Well, after we finished this we needed to jot down what we had just discussed and our hypothesis. After a long time of preparation it was time to finally do the experiment, we were all wreaking in excitement and joy. YAY!

Right, after that we grabbed a beaker, salt, and some water, we mixed it all up. Once we finished that we started to put ice and a thermometer in the beaker to see the temperature. While that was happening one of our fellow teammates took a stopwatch and recorded the first reading and carried on one per minute. As soon as the ice melted we put a Bunsen burner under the beaker to heat up the water and a little bit after that we placed rice into a beaker which then started to burn. Finally everything was done and we had to go back to class. Eventually we had to analyze all the information in a line graph and compare it with a freshwater group.

Did you know that ice actually melts faster in freshwater than saltwater, then it hit us that icebergs don’t really melt in salt water so I wonder how it could melt faster. Also, the saltwater wasn’t boiling too well compared to the freshwater.