Does ice weigh more or less than water?

Does water weigh more when it is frozen? I'm in third grade. Please give me a simple answer.
Erenz 12/12/99

Suppose you have a box of 50 Lego blocks. You can build many different things with them; towers, walls, trucks, airplanes, robots- whatever. All of these objects look different. But you don't really change the total weight of the 50 blocks just by rearranging them in different ways. As long as you don't throw any blocks away, or add any new ones, 50 blocks weigh the same, no matter how you stack them.

Atoms and molecules are the building blocks of matter. Freezing water (or turning it into steam) changes the way the molecules are arranged, but it doesn't change the molecules themselves. It doesn't change their total weight.

Author: Fred Senese senese@antoine.frostburg.edu


General Chemistry Online! Does ice weigh more or less than water?

Copyright © 1997-2010 by Fred Senese
Comments & questions to fsenese@frostburg.edu
Last Revised 02/23/18.URL: http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/measurement/faq/print-does-ice-weigh-more-than-water.shtml