Question

Ice is softer than rock. How can ice produce striations on materials harder than ice?

Answer 1

Hint: The regular ice is frozen water and when it gets warm, ice melts and turns again from solid ice back into liquid water.

Complete step by step answer:
Ice in a snowbank is a mineral and ice in an ice cube from a refrigerator is not a mineral. In rock, if water freezes in a crack, the ice can break the rock apart. Due to these properties, the ice is very important in the processes of erosion where the rocks and the earth are washed or moved to the other location and also in the processes of weathering where the rocks are broken into smaller bits.
Also, Ice is crystallized water and due to this reason that falling on ice hurts more as it does not cushion the fall at all.
In general, most metals are stronger than ice but ice can get more strong when supercooled.
The rocks are solids and even though not all of them have frozen, there is a minor complication about freezing for some rocks. The sedimentary rocks are formed by chemical processes and hence they were never liquid. Thus even though the rocks are solid, they have not frozen.
Also, the liquid water first gets in a gap in the rock, and as the temperature falls the water freezes and increases the volume causing the rock to break.
Thus ice is softer than rock. It is because the ice’s hardness measured on the Mohs scale of hardness of minerals is 1.5 while the hardness of the minerals ranges from 1 to 10. Thus all minerals are harder than the ice.

Note:
1. Smaller boulders are called rocks.
2. Glacier ice is a monomineralic rock, a rock that is made of only one mineral.