Scientists Made Ice Stay Solid Above 2,000°C. The 'Superionic Ice' Could Be Found Inside Uranus and Neptune
The team used diamond-anvil experiments and X-ray probes to track a transition from fcc ice, with hcp becoming dominant above 200 gigapascals.
- Physicist Alexis Forestier of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission led a team identifying a new hexagonal close-packed ice structure under extreme conditions expected in ice giant interiors.
- Under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres and temperatures reaching 2,630 kelvins, water enters a superionic state where oxygen atoms form a rigid lattice while hydrogen nuclei remain mobile.
- Researchers squeezed water samples to 230 gigapascals while using lasers to heat them to 2,357 degrees Celsius, revealing the hexagonal structure as the face-centered cubic signature almost vanished.
- Deep inside Uranus and Neptune, this hexagonal phase could change models of how material and electrical charge move through their interiors, affecting understanding of the planets' strange, lopsided magnetic fields.
- Following a century of ice research, The Korea Research Institute identified Ice XXI, the 21st crystalline ice form, captured freezing at room temperature using a dynamic diamond anvil cell.
19 Articles
19 Articles
Extreme-pressure experiment reveals a strange new ice phase
Researchers at KRISS observed water’s rapid freeze–melt cycles under ultrahigh pressure and discovered Ice XXI, the first new ice phase found in decades. Using advanced high-pressure tech and microsecond XFEL imaging, they uncovered complex crystallization pathways never seen before. Ice XXI’s structure resembles the high-pressure ice found inside Jupiter and Saturn’s moons, hinting at planetary science implications.
Scientists from the French Atomic Energy Agency and alternative energy have been able to monitor the shape of the space object.
SCIENTISTS have created a new, hexagonal form of superionic ice under extreme pressure and temperature. The discovery could help us understand the magnetic fields of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.
At about 2,350°C—hot enough to melt iron at ordinary pressure—water squeezed to more than two million atmospheres can remain partly crystalline instead of boiling. Its oxygen atoms lock into a lattice while hydrogen nuclei flow freely through it, forming superionic ice; researchers have now reported the first direct observation of a previously predicted hexagonal variety.
Synchrotron diffraction reveals a hexagonal oxygen lattice in water ice above 200 gigapascals, although the mobile-hydrogen state is inferred rather than directly imaged.
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