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This is fascinating. I had no idea ice could take on so many crystalline forms depending on the variety of conditions. Apparently there are other shapes even beyond those mentioned in the article: http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/ice_phases.html

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If you find this interesting, you might enjoy Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle", which is based around a highly dangerous (and imaginary) form of ice, ice-nine.

And even if you aren't super excited about ice-nine, it's still a highly enjoyable read.

My first thought when reading the article title was ice-nine :)

I do really like Cat's Cradle, but I don't think its a relevant recommendation. Ice-nine is only a plot device, the book isn't about ice at all.

Well, ice-nine does have a relationship to water specifically. For whatever reason, TV Tropes doesn't currently consider it an instance of the Phlebotinum trope (any substance or phenomenon which is essentially an entirely unexplained but powerful plot device).

Maybe that's an unintentional omission from the wiki, but it could be that the somewhat elaborated hard SF backstory of ice-nine means that it's not just considered "plot fuel".

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/CatsCradle

..and listen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyVWQH7jIg8

There was also a real-life scare in the 70s around "polywater" [1][2] that some people worried could "infect" other water.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater

[2] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/polywater-the-soviet-s...

That Wikipedia article is great. I love the introduction paragraph.

> By 1969 the popular press had taken notice and sparked fears of a "polywater gap" in the USA.

I find it illuminating to understand that "journalists," or the "popular press," were ratcheting up the "fear sells" / fake news bullshit at least as far back as 1969 (and I'm sure it goes back much further). If you were ignorant, and I certainly am, you would think that this is a wholly new phenomenon. I mean, that is what the same "popular press" is telling us today, right?

You might find it informative to read up on the long and inglorious history of "Yellow Journalism". Fearmongering was a time-honored business model for a long time.

There was even a phrase coined in the 1890's for such journalism; "Yellow Journalism[1]"

From the wikipedia article. Frank Luther Mott (of the same era) on the five main characteristics of yellow journalism:

1. Scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news

2. Lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings

3. Use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts

4. Emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips

5. Dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.

I think it's inaccurate and unhelpful to blame the "popular press" and contributes to making a false equivalence about the role of journalism to today's toxic politics (which I find very frustrating). Such a phrase can include everything from: NYTimes, popular tabloids, Fox and Friends, Fox news InfoWars, Slate, the Economist etc etc. There's a huge range of journalistic integrity and quality in that. For all its mistakes, let's not equate the new york times with fox and friends...

Look up the history of media and its role intersecting with the rise of Fascism and Nazism, the various earlier revolutions in Europe (particularly "The Year of Revolutions", 1840, in which there were fifty revolutions throughought Europe and South America), the not-quite-a-revolution Chartist movement in England, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, large aspects of the Reformation / Counter-Reformation (including the 30 Years War), the de Witt brothers' lynching in the Netherlands, the history and background of the Catholic Inquisition (dating from ~850 AD to the 1960s), and the experience of the Romans and Greeks with demagoguery (literally "a man of the people", but which rapidly acquired the connotation of "rabble rouser"), and the tradition of Socrates / Plato / Aristotle vs. the Sophists (from which: sophistry, sophomore, and sophisticated).

It's almost as if there's some fundamental social-system dynamic by which information, information mediation, cognitive capabilities (particularly at the population level), and other information-theoretic and psychological dynamics are deeply rooted in human, and arguably all systems function.

A good capsule summary of this is H.L. Mencken's brief "Brayard vs. Lionheart", written of the 1926 U.S. presidential election, from which the infamous line about an idiot someday being elected to the office is found, but whose real value is in clearly describing the dynamic. And also, IMO, tying it to Gresham's Law.

Thank you! Almost anyone could have just made a cat's cradle reference. You went straight to the source and elevated the conversation in the process.

>The story "Polywater Doodle" by Howard L. Myers (writing under the pseudonym "Dr. Dolittle") appeared in the February 1971 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It features an animal composed entirely of polywater, with the metabolism described by Richard Feynman. (The title of the story is a pun on "Polly Wolly Doodle".)

There's not a day that goes by that I don't wish Feyman was still alive to help slash through the nonsense.

> Thank you! Almost anyone could have just made a cat's cradle reference. You went straight to the source and elevated the conversation in the process.

Polywater wasn't the "source" for Cat's Cradle. The book was published in 1963 and (per Wikipedia) the West didn't take notice of polywater until 1966 at the earliest.

Reading that lead me down a minor rabbithole about "pathological science", and to this entertaining and technically pretty chewy talk from 1953:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/Langmuir/langmuir.htm

Something similar happened with a drug: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritonavir#Polymorphism_and_t...

Definitely learned something new today. Here's a phase diagram of the info in your link:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Phase_di...

This diagram is so weird to me. Bottom part is simple and neat, while the top half just goes crazy. My puny brain desperately wants this world to be understandable and elegantly designed, but apparently atomic structure has a different idea.

All the noise is just details. The chart is basically three parts:

1: Blue is all the pressures and temperatures where water is solid.

2: Green is all the pressures and temperatures where water is liquid.

3: Yellowish red is all the pressures and temperatures where water is vapour.

I'm not sure what to make of the points and little lines. They seem to have something to do with the ranges within those ranges where the different kinds of ice occur.

I guess this chart means that water can only present in trenches and other low lying areas of Mars? On surface, pressure is 600pa but liquid water needs slightly more to avoid boiling instantly.

You might find John Baez's article on this interesting.

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/ice/

He covers both the basics, and some of the reasons why he, as a mathematician, finds the variety of ice structures interesting.

Of note, he mentions that Ice VII (the type of ice discovered in the article) has previously been created by Sandia's Z Machine

http://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/

I remember watching a video on YouTube a few years ago that there are many different structures of ice, and when you cool it down to a specific temperature, it makes a loud cracking noise as it transitions from one form to the other. I can't remember the details exactly sadly.

I believe this guy does research on frozen water crystals https://twitter.com/DevilleSy (at least he does tweet a lot about flakes and has written a book at Wiley's or Springer so..)

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