How does salt melt ice?

Answer 1

simple terms,

when salt gets wet it heats up,

add salt to snow or ice it heats up and melts it

Answer 2

The balance between freezing and melting processes can easily be upset. If the ice/water mixture is cooled, the molecules move slower. The slower-moving molecules are more easily captured by the ice, and freezing occurs at a greater rate than melting. You can see a demonstration of this by clicking on the temperature in the animation and setting it to a lower value (say, -10).

Conversely, heating the mixture makes the molecules move faster on average, and melting is favored. Reset the animation and then enter a higher value for the temperature (say 10) and watch what happens.

Adding salt to the system will also disrupt the equilibrium. Consider replacing some of the water molecules with molecules of some other substance. The foreign molecules dissolve in the water, but do not pack easily into the array of molecules in the solid. Try hitting the "Add Solute" button in the animation above. Notice that there are fewer water molecules on the liquid side because the some of the water has been replaced by salt. The total number of waters captured by the ice per second goes down, so the rate of freezing goes down. The rate of melting is unchanged by the presence of the foreign material, so melting occurs faster than freezing.

Answer 3

Two things happen when ice and water are placed in contact:

Molecules on the surface of the ice escape into the water (melting), and
molecules of water are captured on the surface of the ice (freezing).
When the rate of freezing is the same as the rate of melting, the amount of ice and the amount of water won't change on average (although there are short-term fluctuations at the surface of the ice). The ice and water are said to be in dynamic equilibrium with each other. The balance between freezing and melting can be maintained at 0°C, the melting point of water, unless conditions change in a way that favors one of the processes over the other.

Answer 4

The freezing point of water, the temperature just cold enough to make it freeze into ice, is 0 degrees Celsius. Dissolving salt in water makes the water harder to freeze. To get salt water to freeze you have to make it colder than 0 degrees. So you can say that salt lowers the freezing point of water.

If you add salt to ice, some of the salt will melt. You can suppose that the salt pulls some water away from its crystal form in ice. When that happens, the ice-salt mixture will get colder than 0 degrees.

Here is a recipe for making a very cold freezing mixture: Mix 33 ounces of salt with 100 ounces of snow or finely crushed ice. That is supposed to give a temperature of minus 21 degrees C.

Answer 5

Salt breaks the molecular structure of ice.

Answer 6

a chemical reaction where the temp it raised which melt it , this it why if it is below 10 degrees it won't melt ice

Answer 7

The ocean rarely freezes (except in killer cold places) while lakes do...

Salt reduces the freezing point of fresh water.

Answer 8

salt dehydrates
snow is water
water hydrates
so they cancel each other out
so, no snow cuz salt dehydrated it

Answer 9

It is probably because of the enzymes and chemicals. Enzymes dissolve certain things.

Answer 10

it lowers the freezing point/ the temperature that it freezes at.
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http://science.howstuffworks.com/question58.htm