Mark Megahan
If you are a fan of the late, great, Kurt Vonnegut, you can rest assured that what a University of Nevada, Las Vegas research group whipped up in their lab ISN’T Ice-9. It’s Ice-10. Only, they use Roman numerals and call it Ice-X. If you aren’t into classic science fiction, you probably had no idea that there could be more forms of ice than the kind you put in soda or scrape off your windshield but there are.
Lab crafted ice crystals
A lab breakthrough was achieved recently when “the elusive ice-X” occurred “at 300,000 times atmospheric pressure.” While that seems extremely high, it happens to be “a record low for the existence of this unusual ice.” The ice most of us are familiar with here on the surface of Earth comes in one standard form. All the water molecules are arranged in hexagons.
That’s why snowflakes have six points every time. Scientists are currently aware that there are at least 20 varieties of ice which can exist in nature. The factors which control the crystal lattice formation depend heavily on temperature and pressure conditions of the surrounding environment. The stuff in your freezer is technically “Ice-I.”
In the novel Cat’s Cradle, an Einsteinesque scientist was asked by a general to figure out a way to eliminate mud because his tanks kept getting stuck in it. That got the prof to musing about the way cannonballs can be stacked on a courthouse lawn. While the two concepts seem entirely unrelated, it led to the discovery of an ice lattice in the lab where water was solid at room temperature. All it took to convert ordinary water to ice-9 was put it in contact with a seed crystal of the stuff.
Eventually, in the novel, it destroyed the world when a seed dropped in the ocean by accident. There really is an ice-9 but they call it ice-IX. It happens to be “stable at temperatures below 140 K and pressures between 200 and 400 MPa.” According to Wikipedia, “It is formed by cooling ice III from 208 K to 165 K (rapidly — to avoid forming ice II.)”
While we’re on the subject of stacking, tennis balls work better than cannonballs because they’re fuzzy. One physicist decided to see how many different ways he could stack them in his lab. He even came up with a tower of tennis balls which is as unstable as it is cool. Be sure to watch it collapse in slow motion.
Back in Las Vegas, Lead author Zachary Grande says they were “pretty excited and surprised” to create Ice-X. “A lot of people hadn’t believed it.” They spent three years trying to confirm the experiment and finally published the result last week in Physical Review B.
Colleagues are skeptical
Even though they dotted every i and crossed every t, “other experts are skeptical about whether the results really point to ice-X.” The work “confirmed previous reports of anomalous transitions in ice VII under pressure,” writes Russell Hemley, a physical chemist at the University of Illinois. He thinks there should be more studies in the lab. Water, or dihydrogen monoxide, is “made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.”
Each molecule of water “is strongly attracted to its neighbor.” What makes the big difference in ice varieties is “where each hydrogen sits between the two oxygen atoms.”
Their lab designed Ice-X they note, “is arguably the most extreme of all the phases. It’s the only one where every hydrogen sits squarely in the middle of two oxygens throughout the entire crystal lattice.”
What happens in phases like ice-VII and ice-VIIt, “the hydrogen randomly sidles up to one of its flanking oxygens.”
To create Ice-X in the lab, Grande and his team “crushed ice between two diamonds and periodically heated the solid with a laser in a method they call ‘cook and look.’”
“The laser melted the jumbled crystals, allowing the ice to recrystallize into a different atomic configuration.” Don’t try that at home.
