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May 8, 2019 · The findings, published today in Nature, confirm the existence of “superionic ice,” a new phase of water with bizarre properties. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot. A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one.
- Overview
- Beyond Vonnegut
- Magnetic mysteries
Thought to lurk deep within Neptune and Uranus, the extreme material is actually half as hot as the surface of the sun.
From left to right in this artistic rendering, high-power lasers focus on the surface of a diamond, generating a sequence of shock waves that propagate through a sample of water, simultaneously compressing and heating the initially liquid sample and forcing it to freeze into superionic ice.
From the seas of Antarctica to the depths of your freezer, most ice on Earth is relatively tame stuff. But throughout the solar system and beyond, extreme temperatures and pressures can crush the frozen substance into increasingly odd varieties.
Now, researchers have snapped x-ray images of what might be the newest entrant to ice’s diversity: a highly electrically conductive material known as superionic ice. As the team reports today in the journal Nature, this ice exists at pressures between one and four million times that at sea level and temperatures half as hot as the surface of the sun.
“Yes, we’re talking about ice,” says study leader Marius Millot, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “But the sample is at several thousand degrees.”
While normally unachievable on Earth, such conditions should be present deep inside the watery giants Uranus and Neptune, potentially helping to explain how these distant planets work, including the origins of their unusual magnetic fields.
Scientists already know of 17 varieties of crystalline ice (fans of Kurt Vonnegut might be relieved to know that Ice IX is quite innocuous compared to its fictional counterpart). And more than 30 years ago, physicists predicted that crushing pressure should squeeze water into superionic forms.
Superionic materials are dual beasts, part solid and part liquid, that on a microscopic level consist of a crystal lattice permeated by free floating atomic nuclei that can carry electrical charge. In water—aka H2O—the oxygen atoms would crunch into a solidified crystal while the hydrogen’s protons would zip around like a liquid. (Recently, another team of scientists working with potassium confirmed the existence of a state of matter that is solid and liquid at the same time.)
“It’s quite an exotic state of matter,” says coauthor Federica Coppari, also of the Livermore lab.
Last year, Millot, Coppari, and their colleagues found the first evidence for superionic ice, using diamond anvils and laser-induced shock waves to compress liquid water so much that it turned to solid ice for a few billionths of a second. The team’s measurements showed that the water ice briefly became hundreds of times more electrically conductive than it had previously been, a strong hint that it had gone superionic.
In their latest tests, the researchers used six giant laser beams to generate a sequence of shockwaves that crunched a thin layer of liquid water into solidified ice at millions of times Earth’s surface pressure and between 3,000 and 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Precisely timed x-ray flashes probed the configuration, which again only lasted for a few billionths of a second, and revealed that the oxygen atoms had indeed taken on a crystalline form.
The fact that matter can arrange itself in such a large variety of forms is quite astonishing.
The team’s results are already informing models of Uranus and Neptune. Often known as ice giants, these enormous worlds are around 65 percent water, plus some ammonia and methane, which forms layers much like the rocky-metallic surface, mantle, and core of Earth.
The new experiments indicate that Uranus and Neptune should have a superionic ice layer that acts like our planet’s mantle, which is made of solid rock that still flows on extremely long geological timescales. And that could help explain why they have unusual magnetic fields.
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A startling sunset reddens the Lemaire Channel, off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. The continent’s coastal ice is crumbling as the sea and air around it warm. This photo originally published in “ The Larsen C Ice Shelf Collapse Is Just the Beginning—Antarctica Is Melting .”
A startling sunset reddens the Lemaire Channel, off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. The continent’s coastal ice is crumbling as the sea and air around it warm. This photo originally published in “The Larsen C Ice Shelf Collapse Is Just the Beginning—Antarctica Is Melting.”
Dec 6, 2023 · Understanding ‘hot’ ice physics during deformation is critical in determining future sea-level rise. While it may feel cold to the touch, Sheng Fan and David Prior explain that ice on Earth...
May 26, 2021 · Water ice exists in hugely different environments, artificially or naturally occurring ones across the universe. The phase diagram of crystalline phases of ice is still under construction: a...
- Thomas C. Hansen
- hansen@ill.fr
- 2021
Dec 20, 2005 · Choi’s experiments earlier this year have ended a 10-year quest to find out whether hot ice can be made. But they have unwittingly sparked another mystery.
- Zeeya Merali
May 9, 2019 · It has taken one of the most powerful lasers on the planet, but scientists have done it. They've confirmed the existence of 'superionic' hot ice - frozen water that can remain solid at thousands of degrees of heat.
People also ask
What is hot ice?
Is'superionic' Hot Ice a real thing?
What is hot ice physics?
Is ice hot or cold?
Hot Ice. 'Hot Ice' is when we grow a crystal of sodium acetate from a solution, and doing so we release heat! Chemical structure of sodium acetate trihydrate. This ability to release heat during crystal formation, makes it useful for the reusable hand warmers/heating pads. How does it work?
