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Inside a high-pressure lab in Germany, scientists have done something remarkable, they’ve made ice that forms at room temperature. At Europe’s XFEL facility, researchers compressed liquid water to 2 gigapascals, about 20,000 times the air pressure at sea level, and watched it transform into a completely new phase called ice XXI. It’s a version of water that only appears under crushing force and disappears just as quickly.
The team used a dynamic diamond anvil cell to ramp pressure in about 10 milliseconds, then release it over one second, repeating the cycle more than a thousand times. XFEL’s million-frames-per-second flashes filmed atoms in motion, turning freezing into a process they could finally see. Follow-up diffraction at PETRA III confirmed the strange structure forming in real time, giving scientists a clearer picture of how water behaves under extreme stress.
What they found was extraordinary, a tetragonal crystal built from huge repeating units, 152 water molecules per cell, unlike any other known ice. Ice XXI is metastable, meaning it lingers briefly even when another form should be more stable. In several trials, it appeared as a midpoint on the journey toward the high-pressure phase known as ice VI, revealing hidden transitions in water’s complex behavior.
Those atomic snapshots reach far beyond Earth. Mapping multiple freezing and melting pathways under extreme pressure helps explain what water might do inside icy moons like Titan and Ganymede, where layers of exotic ice could lie buried. The findings also hint that studying water under these conditions could guide the design of new materials built to withstand extreme environments.
Source: s41563-025-02364-x
The team used a dynamic diamond anvil cell to ramp pressure in about 10 milliseconds, then release it over one second, repeating the cycle more than a thousand times. XFEL’s million-frames-per-second flashes filmed atoms in motion, turning freezing into a process they could finally see. Follow-up diffraction at PETRA III confirmed the strange structure forming in real time, giving scientists a clearer picture of how water behaves under extreme stress.
What they found was extraordinary, a tetragonal crystal built from huge repeating units, 152 water molecules per cell, unlike any other known ice. Ice XXI is metastable, meaning it lingers briefly even when another form should be more stable. In several trials, it appeared as a midpoint on the journey toward the high-pressure phase known as ice VI, revealing hidden transitions in water’s complex behavior.
Those atomic snapshots reach far beyond Earth. Mapping multiple freezing and melting pathways under extreme pressure helps explain what water might do inside icy moons like Titan and Ganymede, where layers of exotic ice could lie buried. The findings also hint that studying water under these conditions could guide the design of new materials built to withstand extreme environments.
Source: s41563-025-02364-x
Inside a high-pressure lab in Germany, scientists have done something remarkable, they’ve made ice that forms at room temperature. At Europe’s XFEL facility, researchers compressed liquid water to 2 gigapascals, about 20,000 times the air pressure at sea level, and watched it transform into a completely new phase called ice XXI. It’s a version of water that only appears under crushing force and disappears just as quickly.
The team used a dynamic diamond anvil cell to ramp pressure in about 10 milliseconds, then release it over one second, repeating the cycle more than a thousand times. XFEL’s million-frames-per-second flashes filmed atoms in motion, turning freezing into a process they could finally see. Follow-up diffraction at PETRA III confirmed the strange structure forming in real time, giving scientists a clearer picture of how water behaves under extreme stress.
What they found was extraordinary, a tetragonal crystal built from huge repeating units, 152 water molecules per cell, unlike any other known ice. Ice XXI is metastable, meaning it lingers briefly even when another form should be more stable. In several trials, it appeared as a midpoint on the journey toward the high-pressure phase known as ice VI, revealing hidden transitions in water’s complex behavior.
Those atomic snapshots reach far beyond Earth. Mapping multiple freezing and melting pathways under extreme pressure helps explain what water might do inside icy moons like Titan and Ganymede, where layers of exotic ice could lie buried. The findings also hint that studying water under these conditions could guide the design of new materials built to withstand extreme environments.
Source: s41563-025-02364-x
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