Melting is a solid-to-liquid phase transition that absorbs latent heat. It can be driven by heating, changing phase pressures, or adding solute that causes freezing-point depression. The ice layer between freshwater and cold brine illustrates melting into a cold liquid through dilution and a composition-dependent liquidus.
Frederick Lindemann's heuristic associates melting with vibrational displacement reaching a specified fraction of the nearest-neighbor distance . The displacement convention must be stated: one-coordinate variance and full three-dimensional variance differ by a factor of three. With the high-temperature Einstein mean-square displacement, the displayed convention gives . Neither nor the independent-oscillator approximation is universal.
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Melting is the process by which a solid substance transforms into a liquid when it is heated to its melting point. This transformation occurs because the added heat energy increases the vibrations of the molecules in the solid, causing them to break free from their fixed positions in the solid structure. Melting can be observed in various substances, such as ice melting into water or metal melting to become molten metal. The temperature at which melting occurs is specific to each material and is known as the melting point.