Black, Hot ‘Superionic’ Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water

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.

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.

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

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).

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