Say you’ve got a cooler that’s got some ice in it, and it’s left in the sort of environment where ice in a cooler will melt. Now I know that while the ice is melting, its temperature doesn’t change, but what about the air in the cooler (and later, the water)?
The temp. will tend to equalize, but there is something called latent heat. For ice to change state to water I believe the latent heat factor is about 940 BTU’s. Similarly there is a latent heat factor when water changes to steam. These are applicable in both directions, the BTU’s must be added or subtracted.
When changing from ice to water the water must absorb heat from the surrounding air, so it should get cooler.
Ice in a cooler behaves the same as ice anywhere else. The cooler is insulated so the change occurs more slowly but there is no such thing as perfect insulation. Over time the air in the cooler will warm up. The ice will absorb heat and change to water. By absorbing heat the air is cooled. The outside environment heats the air some more…ice melts and so on till there is no ice left.
I think if you put a thermometer in there you would find the air temp to slowly warm. For awhile it would probably remain stable at a low temp as long as there was a lot of ice but as the ice melted whatever ice remained would have less competition (so to speak) to absorb heat so the melting would proceed more quickly as time went on. In the end the whole thing would be the same temperature as the outside environment.
Close.
Picture a cooler with say, a cold penny in it instead of ice. The penny and the air in the cooler are the same cold temperature. The hot outside heats the plastic of the cooler. The plastic of the cooler is now hotter than the air in the cooler, and heat will flow from the cooler walls to the air, warming it. Some of the heat from the cooler walls will flow from the walls of the cooler, through the air in the cooler, and into the penny warming the penny. The penny does not cool down the air at all. It just takes a tiny bit of the heat that would have otherwise gone to warming the air another degree, and warmed the penny instead. The penny rapidly warms up to the same temp the air is.
Now replace the penny with flozen water. Exactly the same thing happens, except the ice take lots of heat to melt, and then more heat to warm the ice water to warm water. Assuming the air in the cooler and the ice start at the same temp for our experiment, the ice does not cool down the air. As the air in the cooler heas up, the air will always be hotter than the ice. But the warmer air will transfer heat to the ice, and each smal amount of heat that goes into changing the phase of each little it of the water from ice to liquid is no longer available to heat the air up a small amount. So the ice doesn’t cool the air, it prevents the air from heating.