"Imagine there's a large, flat sheet of ice out in front of you, and someone unceremoniously shoves you across it at a high speed. What are you to do? If you're wearing conventional shoes, without crampons or blades attached to them, you're going to have a difficult time. Ice is a very low-friction surface, and there's very little you're going to be able to do to change your momentum without slipping and perhaps falling down."
"But if you put thin blades on the bottoms of your shoes - e.g., wear ice skates - you'll discover that the situation is very much different in this case. As long as you can remain on your feet, with only your blades touching the ice, you'll find that you can control your motion relatively easily, simply by applying forces through your feet (and the blades) to the ice down below."
A low-friction ice surface causes a person in conventional shoes to slide with little ability to change momentum, risking slipping or falling. Thin blades on shoe bottoms concentrate contact and allow forces to be applied through the feet to the ice, enabling controlled acceleration, deceleration, and turning while remaining upright. Most terrestrial ice at normal pressure and sub-freezing temperatures forms hexagonal crystalline Ice Ih. Water molecules in Ice Ih adopt a tetrahedral arrangement with bond angles near 109.5°, contrasting with the 104.5° bond angle in liquid water.
Read at Big Think
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