| Title | Wet, Cold, Slippery Slope |
|---|---|
| Contributor | David H. Silver(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0526.42 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.42 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | David H. Silver |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2026-04-08 |
| Long abstract | Ice’s exceptional slipperiness results primarily from a quasi-liquid layer (QLL) of disordered water molecules at its surface rather than from commonly assumed mechanisms. While pressure melting and frictional heating contribute under specific conditions, neither explains ice’s slickness at rest or across wide temperature ranges. Surface molecules, having fewer hydrogen bonds than those in the interior crystal lattice, form a nanometer-thick disordered layer that functions as a molecular lubricant even well below freezing. Counterintuitively, ice is most slippery around -7°C rather than at 0°C, as the QLL is sufficiently mobile at this temperature while the underlying ice remains hard enough to resist deformation. |
| Print length | 10 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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| Landing Page | Full text URL | Platform | |||
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| https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.42 | Landing page | https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0526.42.pdf | Full text URL |
David H. Silver is an industrial researcher whose career bridges computer vision, computational biology, and science communication. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biology at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology as a Rothschild Scholar, and was awarded a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for his doctoral work in computational biology at Cambridge, UK. Silver’s peer-reviewed publications span multiple domains: computational biology in Nature and PNAS; computer vision systems in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; medical AI in Human Reproduction and MIDL; and entertainment analysis in PLoS One. He holds over a dozen patents in depth sensing, medical imaging, and generative AI. His industry positions include Algorithm Engineer at Intel Corporation, ML Researcher at Apple, and CTO/co-founder roles at several technology startups. Silver maintains academic collaborations with researchers worldwide and serves as a peer reviewer for Image and Vision Computing and PNAS.