Melting

• As ice absorbs heat from its surroundings, it melts or turns back into a liquid, leaving behind a puddle that may take work to clean up. The ice you carry in a cooler, for example, will turn into a soup of water with floating ice chunks by the end of the day. Dry ice, by contrast, doesn't leave a puddle when it melts. The carbon dioxide goes directly from solid to gas phase, so the only product is a tasteless, odorless, invisible gas --- no cleanup required.
  
  

Temperature

• Carbon dioxide freezes at about 78 degrees Celsius below zero, a much lower temperature than the freezing point of water. Consequently, you can cool a container or a material to a much lower temperature with dry ice than you can with ice. Moreover, the enthalpy of sublimation for dry ice is greater than the enthalpy of fusion for water, which is just another way to say that dry ice absorbs more heat as it sublimes than water does as it melts.
  
  

Sublimation

• Melting water is a fairly boring process; it's such a common occurrence you've probably seen it many times before. When carbon dioxide sublimes, by contrast, it absorbs heat from the surrounding air, which becomes so cold that condensation occurs and a mist can form. Placing dry ice in water accentuates this effect and creates a large amount of dense fog or mist. Consequently, ice is much less useful than dry ice for performing magic tricks or creating stage effects.
  
  

Cleaning

• Dry ice can also be used for cleaning in industrial applications. Blasting small pieces of dry ice with compressed air and shooting them from a nozzle creates a stream of pellets that can clean dirt or residues from various kinds of equipment. Ice cannot be used for the same purpose because it would leave water behind, which is undesirable in many kinds of machinery. Consequently, ice is less useful than dry ice for cleaning certain kinds of industrial equipment, particularly in the food processing industry, where standing water allows pathogens to multiply.