\n<\/p>\n
Chances are that all your encounters with frozen water\u2014while trudging through slushy winter streets, perhaps, or treating yourself to cool summer lemonades\u2014have been confined to one structural form of ice, dubbed Ih, with the h referring to its crystal lattice\u2019s hexagonal nature. But there is so much more to ice than that.<\/p>\n
For more than a century scientists have been striving to push ice into extreme conditions, creating progressively more exotic structures\u2014they\u2019ve made more than 20 crystalline forms to date, in fact, none of which we are likely to experience in our lifetimes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWater is a beautiful, elegant system that consistently shows new, remarkable behavior,\u201d says Ashkan Salamat, a physical chemist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. \u201cFor something so simple, it has beautiful complexity.\u201d<\/p>\n
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At the heart of all these exotic ices\u2014and our more mundane ice, as well as water and steam\u2014is the same molecule: H2O, an oxygen atom flanked by hydrogen atoms forming an angle of 104.5 degrees. In every variety of ice, H2O molecules interact, with weak connections called hydrogen bonds forming between one oxygen and one hydrogen atom in separate molecules. Different arrangements of these hydrogen bonds can shape ice\u2019s crystalline structure into various configurations, from a hexagonal prism to a cubic lattice to less familiar lattice systems such as rhombohedral and tetragonal.<\/p>\n
The hydrogen bonds between water molecules are extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and pressure, Salamat says, giving water what he calls \u201cquantumlike behavior.\u201d Molecules are forced into dramatically different relations with one another at certain thresholds of these conditions. So he and other scientists conjure arcane recipes\u2014smashing water with 3,000 times atmospheric pressure, for example, or cooling it (with a dash of potassium hydroxide) to \u2013330 degrees Fahrenheit (\u2013200 degrees Celsius) for a week\u2014all in hot pursuit of new forms of ice.<\/p>\n
The newest frozen discovery is ice XXI, announced in Nature Materials. (Salamat wasn\u2019t involved in that work, although his team published the discovery of a new transitional phase dubbed ice VIIt in 2022.) Ice XXI is a fleeting, blocky crystal structure that develops from supercompressed water: the scientists could see it only by using an extremely powerful x-ray free-electron laser that functions essentially like a high-speed camera.<\/p>\n
\u201cLooking at things at a very, very fast rate allows us to observe weird and wonderful phenomena,\u201d Salamat says, calling the laser \u201can incredibly exciting new toy.\u201d The laser enables researchers to spot exotic ices that exist only briefly, introducing time as a variable along with temperature and pressure.<\/p>\n
Although they do not exist naturally on Earth, some of these strange forms of ice may form on other worlds\u2014deep inside Neptune, trapped inside a distant moon or at some even more alien location. But for Salamat, the laboratory can prove just as exotic. \u201cThere are still new and exciting things that we can discover,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. Scientific American<\/span> has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a Scientific American<\/span> subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm <\/span>always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/span>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chances are that all your encounters with frozen water\u2014while trudging through slushy winter streets, perhaps, or treating yourself to cool summer lemonades\u2014have been confined to one structural form of ice, dubbed Ih, with the h referring to its crystal lattice\u2019s hexagonal nature. But there is so much more to ice than that. For more than<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[1807,589,22412,10545,2466,384],"class_list":{"0":"post-42561","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-create","9":"tag-earth","10":"tag-exotic","11":"tag-forms","12":"tag-ice","13":"tag-scientists"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}