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Black, Hot ‘Superionic’ Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water
- ChuckMcM 7y agoI can't help but read it supersonic ice but either way that is pretty cool stuff. The idea of an face centered cubic oxygen structure with hydrogen nuclei swimming around in it as charge carriers is pretty wild. Seems the only thing left to do there is to collapse a magnetic field around it and see if you can get the hydrogen nuclei to fuse.
- kendallpark 7y agoArticle: > They squeezed a droplet of room-temperature water between the pointy ends of two cut diamonds. By the time the pressure raised to about a gigapascal, roughly 10 times that at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the water had transformed into a tetragonal crystal called ice VI. By about 2 gigapascals, it had switched into ice VII, a denser, cubic form transparent to the naked eye that scientists recently discovered also exists in tiny pockets inside natural diamonds. Actual paper: > Double-distilled, deionized water was loaded in diamond anvil cells (DACs) with 200×200μm quartz plates either 15 or 30μm thick and four ruby microspheres, then compressed at room temperature to 2.5GPa to form ice VII. A great example of science journalism translating technical language into vernacular.
- anoncow 7y agoThis is spectacular. Journalism, such as this, can act as a catalyst for growth of society.
- zhte415 7y agoWhat's the weight of the Marinas Trench in terms of Libraries of Congress?
- e40 7y agoLet's hope they don't get to ice IX.
- zeristor 7y agoI suppose that's when the cat falls of out its cradle.
- mirimir 7y agoI wonder what happens, at the same pressure, as the temperature drops. Maybe a new form?
- civility 7y agoThere is a nice diagram on this page: http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_phase_diagram.html
- mirimir 7y agoThanks. From the Nature paper cited in TFA:[0] > Here we use laser-driven shockwaves to simultaneously compress and heat liquid water samples to 100–400 gigapascals and 2,000–3,000 kelvin. And in the phase diagram that you cited, it stays at ice XVIII over the whole temperature range. 0) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1114-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1114-6
- anigbrowl 7y agoAvailable soon at the Sharper Image. I'm not kidding, someone will figure out a way to market this to people who have more money than sense (or taste).
- atoav 7y agoNot sure how you would drink something with the pressure of 2 GPa..
- Simon_says 7y agoSlowly, then all at once.
- anigbrowl 7y ago1 drop is enough to fill a whole can, a true miracle of science that can be yours for only $9.99
- rocqua 7y agoCool to see essentially a reverse metal. One where protons rather than electrons are free.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]