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Although it may seem otherwise, water is a rare liquid. It has properties that are not found in other liquids, such as its frozen form that floats, which allows fish to live under the ice; or it has at least 19 different forms of solid phases -as far as we know-, some of them so strange that they have only been seen in a laboratory, such as superionic ice, both solid and liquid. Now, researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (USA) claim to have discovered a new type that, although it does not occur naturally on the Earth’s surface, may be key to understanding how the liquid element behaves in other giant planets. The results have just been published in the journal ‘Physical Review B’.
The key to the ‘exotic’ behavior lies in the arrangement of its molecules, which varies greatly depending on the conditions that surround it. We can see how it falls in the form of snow or hail on our heads, for example. This state is known to scientists as Ice-I, and they know that their oxygen atoms are arranged in a hexagonal shape. But if that same ice is subjected to even colder temperatures and different pressures are applied, the molecules take on other orders, sometimes unstable (which is why many can only be emulated in laboratories).
In the case of Ice-VII and the Ice-Xthe atoms are ‘placed’ in cubic structures, although the difference between the two lies in the difference in pressure to which they are subjected, which implies that in the first the hydrogen molecules are ‘disordered’ and in the second they are placed symmetrically.
The goal of the team captained by Zach Grande it was knowing what was happening between one state and another. This is how they discovered an intermediate state, baptized as Ice-VII
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