There are a number of things I found to be odd from the video. First, are we to assume the bullet was fired from a gun? If so, wouldn't it break apart upon contacting the hard surface of the ice as bullets are designed to do? How could it just stop and spin upright in place without ricochet or anything like that?

Second, it spins for a fucking long time without seeming to lose any momentum, which is very strange. It even seems to speed up sometimes as it spins. Anyone who has ever played with a spinning top knows that it gradually slows down and loses RPMs over time, which didn't happen here. Third, what's with the noise it's making? I don't think that's natural and seems edited in afterward.

What I think we're seeing is a bullet that was taken out of its cartridge, placed on the ice, then spun with some sort of electromagnet, which also may explain the weird noise and why we never hear a gunshot or see the bullet fired from a gun. It also explains how there isn't any kind of deformation of the bullet which is impossible to achieve if it's fired. It's just some dorks attempt at getting a lot of Youtube views via viral video.

Drew Linky wrote:

My Dad saw this too. (He's a physics major) He says... "When a bullet is 'rifled', it does spin, and if it hit the ice the right way, the inertia could possibly force the ice down into a divet where it would smooth out. As for friction, ice has a very very low coefficient of friction, so heat buildup wouldn't be a big problem Unless the bullet was rougher and touched more of the ice at once." tl;dr: Ice is smooth, bullets are small. If it's real and the bullet is spinning on it's nose, that's a tiny bit of surface area it's touching, friction won't be a problem. Inertia could make a smooth bowl in the ice. I won't decide for now.

That's all well and good, but it doesn't address the ballistics part of the question where any bullet fired toward ice will either (1) punch a hole right through if the ice is thin, or (2) the bullet will break apart and/or deform considerably (as bullets are designed to do when they encounter resistence, such as a human body) if the ice is thick enough to stop it.

There's just no way a bullet fired from a gun could magically just stop on its nose and spin. Where has all the forward ballistic energy gone?

The bullet would be deformed then if it hit something else first. Bullets are designed to either break apart into a million pieces or flatten and spread out as much as possible after striking their target. If a bullet stayed whole and unchanged when you shot someone with it, it would pass right through the person and not do very much damage. It's all the metal shards and jagged spinning slug that tears up a body and does all the internal damage.