When you step onto an icy sidewalk or push off on skis, the surface can seem to vanish beneath you. For more than a century, scientists have debated why ice stays slippery, even well below freezing.

It’s a wintertime question that you may have had as you struggled down a frozen sidewalk, or strapped on some ice skates: Just why is ice slippery, anyway? It turns out the answer is somewhat ...

It’s an oft-cited science “fact” that ice is slippery due to pressure or friction, but this explanation doesn’t explain why ice’s slippery behavior remains at temperatures where such melting isn’t ...

The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this ...

[CLIP: Skates cut across the ice at an ice rink, and music plays in the background.] Kendra Pierre-Louis: So we’re out here today in lower Manhattan ice-skating. There are lots of kids skating around, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a ...