Weird water phase “ice-VII” can grow as fast as 1,000 miles per hour

So i've always heard of different types of ice and know intense pressure does weird things to matter but this is pretty cool and kind of scary. While i'm not too worried about the scenario they describe happening it does make me wonder if they've been thinking of ways to weaponize it. I dunno I just picture a big cloud like a hailstorm that freezes all the water in your body on contact. Thankfully this is probably ridiculous.

arstechnica.com...

physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com...

link to paper

Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle introduced the world to so-called "Ice Nine," a fictional form of water that freezes at room temperature. If it so much as touches a drop of regular water, that will freeze, too, and so on, spreading so rapidly that it freezes everything that comes into contact with it.

Fortunately for Earth, Ice-Nine doesn't exist. But there is an exotic form of ice dubbed "ice VII" that physicists can create in the laboratory. It's harmless in terrestrial conditions. But on an ocean world like Jupiter's moon, Europa, it could behave just like Ice-Nine under the right conditions, freezing an entire world within hours—with some key implications for the possibility of finding life on distant exoplanets.

It's the shape formed by the water molecules that determine which phase of ice you get. That ice in your glass of whiskey is technically ice Ih—"h" for hexagon, since that's the shape that all the oxygen atoms line up in during freezing. But in theory, there should be at least 17 different crystalline phases of water—which one you get depends on the pressure and temperature of any given environment.

Ice Ih will turn into ice-II if you apply enough pressure, with oxygen atoms arranged in a rhomboid shape. Keep increasing the pressure and you'll get ice-III, ice-IV, ice-V, ice-VI and so on. Some form of ice is theoretically possible even at crazy-high temperatures of hundreds of degrees Celsius, provided the pressure is high enough.

Ice-VII's oxygen atoms are arranged in a cubic shape, something that only occurs at pressures more than 10,000 times that on Earth's surface. It's created in the lab by zapping thin samples of water sandwiched between plates with high-intensity shock waves or laser pulses. In 2017, Stanford University physicists captured the formation of ice VII (in just six nanoseconds) on film for the very first time.

Our work shows that ice-VII forms in a very unusual way—by popping into existence in tiny clusters of about 100 molecules and then growing extremely fast, at over 1,000 miles per hour," co-author Jonathan Belof told Physics Buzz. These might just be the kinds of conditions that exist on so-called "ocean worlds": bodies that, like Earth, have an abundance of water. "Water on the ocean worlds, under bombardment from other planetary bodies such as meteors or comets, undergoes intense changes for which life might not survive," he says.

The shock waves from those explosions would be sufficient to compress any water to just the right high pressure to make it freeze into ice-VII at sufficient depths (several hundreds of kilometers). And if that ice-VII spreads rapidly to the surface, it could spell doom for any life on said exoplanet. "Our aim is to find out as much as possible about [ice-VII] so that we can figure out if these planets really can support life, and what the limits of habitability might be," says Belof.

a reply to: dug88

Despite being made up of solid, hot rock under unimaginable pressure, the mantle still has water within it. This comes in a variety of different forms, with some water molecules being mixed in with other minerals. Only now are scientists beginning to fully understand just how much water is being held more than 600 kilometers (370 miles) under our feet.

One form that the water takes under such pressures is a crystalline structure known as ice VII. We’ve known that ice VII exists deep within the Earth, and it has even been created in the lab. But for obvious reasons, it has proven impossible to find a naturally occurring sample of ice VII at the surface. That is, until now.

Researchers found that some diamonds collected from mines in southern Africa and China contained samples of ice VII, reporting their discovery in Science. This makes them the first-known naturally occurring examples of ice VII ever discovered, but what is more, they tell us that there must be liquid water floating around even under such extreme pressure and heat.

IFLscience.com, March 9, 2018 - Ice VII Trapped In Diamonds Is First Direct Evidence That Liquid Water Exists 600 Kilometers Underground.

It was found to exist on earth earlier this year. It is trapped in diamonds that as they are formed push hydrogen and oxygen into ice VII form. The good thing is these are small amounts and to get to the ice VII you have to melt the diamond which means ice VII is no longer in that shape.

If the calculations are correct, there is equal amounts of ice VII trapped in diamonds as the water in the earth's oceans (same source).

The Vonnegut tale is also inspiration to the Satriani song of the same name on Surfing With the Alien!

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
a reply to: dug88

Despite being made up of solid, hot rock under unimaginable pressure, the mantle still has water within it. This comes in a variety of different forms, with some water molecules being mixed in with other minerals. Only now are scientists beginning to fully understand just how much water is being held more than 600 kilometers (370 miles) under our feet.

One form that the water takes under such pressures is a crystalline structure known as ice VII. We’ve known that ice VII exists deep within the Earth, and it has even been created in the lab. But for obvious reasons, it has proven impossible to find a naturally occurring sample of ice VII at the surface. That is, until now.

Researchers found that some diamonds collected from mines in southern Africa and China contained samples of ice VII, reporting their discovery in Science. This makes them the first-known naturally occurring examples of ice VII ever discovered, but what is more, they tell us that there must be liquid water floating around even under such extreme pressure and heat.

IFLscience.com, March 9, 2018 - Ice VII Trapped In Diamonds Is First Direct Evidence That Liquid Water Exists 600 Kilometers Underground.

It was found to exist on earth earlier this year. It is trapped in diamonds that as they are formed push hydrogen and oxygen into ice VII form. The good thing is these are small amounts and to get to the ice VII you have to melt the diamond which means ice VII is no longer in that shape.

If the calculations are correct, there is equal amounts of ice VII trapped in diamonds as the water in the earth's oceans (same source).

The Vonnegut tale is also inspiration to the Satriani song of the same name on Surfing With the Alien!

Oh cool i've always liked satriani but I didn't know that.

a reply to: dug88

I read an article a couple years back about some scientists smashing water into a solid making ice that could burn the skin right off your hand at touch it was really hot. Not sure how long it would stay in solid form.

You've been watching "Geo-storm".

a reply to: dug88

I remember reading about form of water I think they found it at the bottom of the ocean somewhere that wasn't really ice, but the pressure it was under compacted it's molecules so much that it was practically a solid.

I don't think it was the same thing as the previous post that would burn you.

Recently at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Brighton, New York, one of the world’s most powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the water’s pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that beamed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second offered humanity’s first glimpse of water under those extreme conditions.

The X-rays revealed that the water inside the shock wave didn’t become a superheated liquid or gas. Paradoxically — but just as physicists squinting at screens in an adjacent room had expected — the atoms froze solid, forming crystalline ice.

Superionic ice can now claim the mantle of Ice XVIII

Quantamagazine.org - Black, Hot Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water.

There are even more ionic forms of water being discovered! There are 18 configurations of water ice... known so far.

This one is really strange. The hydrogen flow freely through the oxygen which binds up in a crystal lattice. The article calls it "a new state of matter" (same source).

They think this is what is inside solid ice planets and give them strange magnetic fields.

So does mean that we one step closer to "Demolition Man" styled prisons? Why yes it does. I'm going to start buying up a lot of Taco Bell stock (yes-yes, I know it's owned by Yum! Brands! of china. guess that explained all the Asian influenced fashion in that movie)

a reply to: Guyfriday

I thought pessi co owned taco bell and kfc

One particular type of amorphous ice was first discovered in the 1980s: it forms when we freeze water into ice at extreme temperatures, and put that ice under a tremendous amount of pressure. It was assumed the resulting amorphous structure was related to liquid water – as in, you could freeze water into amorphous ice and 'melt' it back again – but scientists are not so sure any more.

In an attempt to study high-density amorphous ice, scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory instead accidentally created a succession of forms of crystalline ice, instead.

... They froze a three-millimetre sphere of heavy water, which has an extra neutron in the hydrogen nucleus [deuterium]; this handy feature enables neutron scattering analysis.

They then brought the temperature of the sphere down to 100.15 Kelvin (-173 degrees Celsius), while gradually raising the pressure to around 28,000 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.

But when they started to look at the molecular structure, they found that the ice had sequentially transformed through four crystalline forms. It started at ice Ih - that's normal ice, with a hexagonal structure - and moved through ice IX and ice XV, before ending up at ice XIII.

sciencealert.com, May 28, 2019 - Scientists Trying to Make a Rare Type of Ice Just Stumbled Upon Something Even Weirder.

By taking their time with the increasing pressure, the heavy water iced went through successive forms, including ice IX. They other attempts at making dense ices always skipped passed ice IX, but by taking their time, they were able to observe it forming. The article says "they thought their sample might be tainted" so they ran the experiment a few more times (same source). Each time it cycled through the various crystal ices!

Their previous theory on what is happening may be incomplete or even wrong! The article states one of scientists states, "the second critical point might not exist" [where supercooled water transitions to next phase] (same source).

This some crazy stuff to think about! I am glad we don't "know it all" already and novelty is still being found in experiments like this!!