The ice surface softening during friction is shown as a result of spontaneous appearance of shear strain caused by external supercritical heating. This transformation is described by the Kelvin-Voigt equation for viscoelastic medium, by the relaxation equations of Landau-Khalatnikov-type and for heat conductivity. The study reveals that the above-named equations formally coincide with the synergetic Lorenz system, where the order parameter is reduced to shear strain, stress acts as the conjugate field, and temperature plays the role of a control parameter. Using the adiabatic approximation, the stationary values of these quantities are derived. The examination of dependence of the relaxed shear modulus on strain explains the ice surface softening according to the first-order transition mechanism. The critical heating rate is proportional to the relaxed value of the ice shear modulus and inversely proportional to its typical value.

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