
Black, Hot ‘Superionic’ Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water - furcyd
https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-hot-superionic-ice-may-be-natures-most-common-form-of-water-20190508/
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kendallpark
Article:

> 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.

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e40
Let's hope they don't get to ice IX.

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zeristor
I suppose that's when the cat falls of out its cradle.

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ChuckMcM
I 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.

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hinkley
I got superironic ice. I wasn't sure what that was. Extra edgy?

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garmaine
Given its crystalline structure, it’s actually less edgy.

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rocqua
Cool to see essentially a reverse metal. One where protons rather than
electrons are free.

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anigbrowl
Available 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).

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atoav
Not sure how you would drink something with the pressure of 2 GPa..

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Simon_says
Slowly, then all at once.

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mirimir
I wonder what happens, at the same pressure, as the temperature drops. Maybe a
new form?

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civility
There is a nice diagram on this page:

    
    
        http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_phase_diagram.html

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mirimir
Thanks. 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)

