Why Ice is Slippery

Ice has a hexagonal crystal structure, but what happens
at the surface boundary to make ice slippery?

Ice is a very common solid here on Earth yet one of the most puzzling. Take the seemingly simple question, “Why is ice slippery?”, for example. Common wisdom says that when you step on an icy surface the pressure melts the ice a little bit to create a thin layer of water that acts as a lubricant. It’s due to the unique property of water: the solid form is less dense than the liquid form. We take it for granted that an ice cube will float in a glass of water, but for most material the solid form would sink to the bottom. And because ice has a lower density it is also true that the melting point of ice is depressed as pressure increases. 
The theory goes that as you walk on ice the increase in pressure lowers the melting point of the top layer of the ice and it melts for a brief moment, then refreezes as you pass by. The problem with this explanation is that the effect is very small and would only reduce the melting point by a few hundredths of a degree at most. Yet ice is still slippery when its temperature is far below the melting point.
One possible explanation is that friction plays a part as well. The act of walking on ice creates friction which heats the ice to create a slippery surface. But the problem with this is that ice is still slippery regardless of whether or not you are moving. If you are standing still there is no friction, yet it’s still slippery.
A better theory is that ice has an intrinsic liquid layer. Water molecules at the surface remain unfrozen because there are no molecules above them to hold them in place. This was first proposed in 1859 by Michael Faraday who noticed that two ice cubes will fuse together if they are pressed against one another. Faraday’s explanation for this is that the liquid layers freeze when they are no longer at the surface. But even this theory is not quite correct. 
In 1996, a team led by Gabor Somorjai, a professor of chemistry at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, bombarded the surface of ice with electrons. By observing how they bounced off they were able to make an amazing discovery: What actually makes the surface of ice slippery are rapidly vibrating water molecules. These “liquid-like” water molecules do not move from side to side—only up and down. This is an important distinction. If the atoms moved from side to side, the layer would actually become liquid, which is what happens when the temperature rises above 0° C. It turns out that it is this “liquid-like” layer that makes ice slippery.