Ice and Water

I witnessed a simple but cool event of physics the other day. My mom always drinks water without ice because she doesn’t like her water being too cold. I, on the other hand, like ice in my water, so when she brought me a cup of water without ice, I asked her to put ice in it. Normally, you would put the ice in first, but since there was already water in the cup, she had to put the ice in after. When she put the cup under the ice dispenser and ice started coming out, water started splashing all over. One can figure out why this happens by using simple physics concepts. The force of a heavy solid, ice, falling on water, a fluid, creates the splash. The ice displaces the water and makes it come up. Ice is lighter and less dense than water, however, if you put it in the cup after the water, the water splashes up because the ice has a lot of kinetic and potential energy when falling from the dispenser into the cup. So by analyzing an event using physics, one can figure out why something happened.