Ice, Ice, Baby....

About two weeks ago I went ice skating with some friends of mine. It was so much fun and I didn't even fall! But both myself and my friends' amateur moves were put to shame when a few couples started showing us how its really done! They twirled, they spun, they jumped and twirled some more. There's a lot of physics in fancy ice skating- er, figure skating. First of all, we see Newton's first law: an object at motion stays in motion until acted upon by a force. The ice skaters glide across the ice because its Force of Friction isn't big enough to actually stop them; they put a force on themselves to stop themselves by dragging their skate on the ice. Unless they drag their foot, they'd just keep going. We also see Newton's Third Law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For the couple that did the jump turns, as they pushed off of the ice with their skate the put a force on the ice, and the ice put the same force back on the skater which caused them to go up. Though I can't do fancy tricks that involve tons of physics, I still had loads of fun.