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fubo t1_iy6hncw wrote

It's a matter of what properties you care about: making something cold, vs. breaking up ice to stop it from being slippery.

In the ice-cream maker, you're trying to transfer coldness out of the ice and into the ice-cream, to make the water in the ice-cream freeze. It doesn't matter to you that the ice melts in the process.

On the road, you're trying to melt and break up the ice so it's less slippery. You don't really care about coldness.

Most of the energy involved doesn't go into changing the temperature; it goes into shifting water between solid and liquid forms. This is the latent heat of fusion ... where "fusion" doesn't mean nuclear fusion like the sun, but rather water physically fusing into ice.

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