Photo Credit: Edward Savaria

Home< Science< Ice Skating

Wonder about...
The Blue Cross RiverRink

Philadelphians can walk on water.  Well, they can glide on it anyway.  Each year the Blue Cross RiverRink is rebuilt at Penn’s Landing on the Delaware River.  But before we can show off our spins, jumps, and falls, the folks at Penn’s Landing have to freeze a parking lot full of ice, and keep it frozen under us.  How do they do that??

Before there was a rink, there was... hundreds of tiny tubes on a bed of sand.

With water.

The staff builds a big wooden frame and fills it in with a layer of sand.  This protects the parking lot, and evens out the bottom of the rink.  Then, they lay down hundreds of tiny tubes, running back and forth, across the rink.

They fill the tubes with water, and hook those tubes to a “chiller” which cools the water down to -9C ??F and pushes it through the tubes.  Does something sound weird about that?  It should!  Shouldn’t the water in the tubes be frozen ice??

Before there was a rink, there was... A chiller (top right) pushing cold water through tubes under the rink.

 

 

What keeps the water from freezing?

Anti-freeze, of course.  Click to see how.