Quick answer
Bullets spin on ice because rifling, the spiral grooves inside a gun barrel, gives them a fast spin. When a bullet bounces off hard, slippery ice, it loses most of its forward speed but keeps some of its spin, so it keeps turning.
- Rifling makes a bullet spin, and that rotation keeps it stable and accurate in flight.
- Most shots at ice do not end with a spinning bullet. Direct hits stick and shallow shots ricochet.
- It is something to watch on video, not to try. Never shoot at ice or water.
In a well-known MythBusters test, a bullet fired at a frozen lake ended up lying on the ice, spinning in place. Do not try this. Bullets ricochet off ice, and hunter education rules say not to shoot at a flat, hard surface or water.
Why do bullets spin on ice?
A bullet leaves a rifled gun barrel spinning very fast, because spiral grooves inside the barrel force it to turn. If the bullet hits ice and loses its forward speed but keeps some of its spin, it can end up spinning in place. Ice is slippery, so friction is slow to stop it.
This article explains the physics and what the MythBusters test found.
Why Do Bullets Spin on Ice? (Detailed Explanation)
Bullets spin on ice because of how guns are made, how bullets stabilize in flight, physics, and the properties of ice.
Let’s break down each part of the explanation in more detail.
Bullets Spin on Ice Because of the Rifling of Gun Barrels
The spin starts inside the gun.
Bullets spin because of the rifling in gun barrels.
Rifling is a set of spiral grooves cut into the inside of a gun barrel. The raised ridges between the grooves, called lands, cut into the bullet as it is pushed down the barrel. The bullet has to follow the spiral, so it leaves the barrel spinning, as ScienceABC explains. The gas pressure pushes the bullet forward. It is the grooves that make it turn.
Bullets Spin To Stay Stable in Flight
The rotation stabilizes the bullet while it is airborne, keeping it on a more accurate and direct path toward a target.
Rifling is an essential part of modern firearm design. Without spin, bullets would be much less accurate.
A bullet with no spin would tend to tip sideways in the air and would not be very accurate.
The spin seen on the ice is the spin the barrel gave the bullet, and it is very fast. Writing about the MythBusters test, physicist David Zaslavsky gave a figure of 80,000 revolutions per minute for a bullet leaving the gun.
The Properties of Ice
Two things about ice matter here. It is hard, and it is slippery.
Ice is a hard solid. In the MythBusters tests, bullets that hit the ice directly stuck in it, and bullets that hit at a shallow angle bounced away.
The impact takes away the bullet’s forward speed, but it does not always stop the spin.
Another property of ice that contributes to this effect is its low friction.
Friction is a natural force that resists motion, and it is created when two surfaces rub together.
The lower the friction between two surfaces, the more easily one slides over the other. Ice has very low friction. In an OpenStax physics textbook table, steel on ice has a friction coefficient of 0.04 at rest and 0.02 when sliding, compared with 1.0 and 0.7 for rubber on dry concrete.
To say that differently, ice is slippery.
Nothing is powering the bullet once it lands. It is using up the spin it already has. Friction slows that spin, but because ice is slippery it does so slowly.
As a result, a bullet can keep spinning on ice for a while before it stops.
Why Do Bullets Spin on Ice? (Mythbusters)
The MythBusters television show tested this as one segment of an episode. The test was run by Kari Byron, Tory Belleci and Grant Imahara, and they rated the myth confirmed.
The episode is “Spy Car 2,” the seventh episode of the 2011 season, which first aired on May 18, 2011, according to the Wikipedia episode list.
The team set up a handgun to fire at the ice from a fixed position.
Bullets that hit the ice directly stuck in it. Bullets that hit at a shallow angle ricocheted away and could not be found.
Early tests did not produce a spinning bullet.
But the Mythbusters crew didn’t give up.
In winter the team moved to frozen Caples Lake and kept testing.
After the later shots the team found bullets lying on the ice, spinning in place on their sides. The bullets were not stuck in the ice.
The video of the spinning bullet shows the result. This was a controlled test with a fixed gun rig on a prepared site. It is not something to copy. Every successful shot was a ricochet, and ricochets are unpredictable.
Do All Bullets Spin on Ice?
Not every shot ends with a spinning bullet. In the MythBusters tests, shots that hit directly stuck in the ice and shallow shots ricocheted away. The claim that only full metal jacket bullets spin could not be confirmed.
Full metal jacket bullets are made with a soft core of lead that is surrounded by a harder shell of metal.
A fully jacketed bullet is designed to expand less on impact than a hollow-point or soft-point bullet.
Hollow-point and soft-point bullets are designed to expand more on impact. Whether that stops them from spinning on ice has not been shown.
Do Bullets Have To Bounce on the Ice to Spin?
Bullets that spin on ice first bounce or ricochet off of the ice.
The bounce takes away most of the bullet’s forward speed but leaves it with some of its spin.
This follows from the conservation of angular momentum. A spinning object keeps its spin unless an outside twisting force, called a torque, acts on it, as OpenStax University Physics explains. On slippery ice the torque from friction is small, so the spin fades slowly.
The collision with the ice removes most of the bullet’s forward momentum. Much of the spin is left, so the bullet keeps spinning on the ice. The details are not fully settled. Zaslavsky noted that the MythBusters bullets ended up spinning in several different directions, and suggested that hits from flying fragments of ice turn the bullet during the impact.
When Do Bullets Not Spin On Ice?
Most shots at ice do not end with a spinning bullet.
In the MythBusters tests, two things stopped it:
- The bullet hits the ice directly and sticks in it
- The bullet glances off at a shallow angle and flies away
Final Thoughts: Why Do Bullets Spin on Ice?
A bullet spinning on ice looks like a trick, but it follows ordinary physics. The barrel gives the bullet a fast spin, the ice takes away its forward speed, and the slippery surface lets it keep turning.
It is something to watch on video, not to try. Never shoot at ice or water. Texas Parks and Wildlife warns against shooting at flat, hard surfaces such as water, rocks or steel because of ricochets, and the NSSF notes that even a small .22 bullet can travel more than a mile.
Related posts:
Sources
Texas Parks and Wildlife (shooting safety rules)
Hunter Ed (primary rules of firearm safety)
NSSF (firearm safety rules)
Wikipedia (MythBusters 2011 season)
ScienceABC (how rifling works)
OpenStax University Physics (conservation of angular momentum)
OpenStax College Physics 2e (friction)
David Zaslavsky (spinning bullets, 2011)
Frontiers in Physics (background on precession)
Reviewed October 2026. We added clear warnings not to shoot at ice or water, corrected how rifling makes a bullet spin and what the MythBusters test found, and removed an unverified eyewitness claim and unsupported claims about bullet types, using Texas Parks and Wildlife, the NSSF, OpenStax and ScienceABC.