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Dang! We knew sleeping through chemistry class would come back to haunt us. Call us crazy, but molecules and elements just don't excite us the way good grammar does. But we're professionals. We're going to put our fear of Bunsen burners behind us and get to the bottom of this tall drink of a question. To laypeople (like us), ice certainly looks like it should sink. But like so many cruise ships, ice slaps expectation across the face. And it's all thanks to the fact that ice is less dense than water. Water has a density of 1.00 gram/cubic centimeter. Ice, on the other
hand, has a density of 0.931 gram/cubic centimeter. This difference is due to hydrogen bonding. It's just enough to keep ice at the top of your water bottle. Yay for ice! But what exactly is density? How is it measured? And more importantly, does anyone really care? We'll spare you the formulas and just say that density is basically a way of measuring how "heavy" an object is. Objects with higher density have a greater mass per volume, and with more mass comes more weight. Or something like that.
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