Scientists made a new kind of ice that might exist on distant moons

We still know so little about water! But a lot of demagogues on a daily basis want us to believe in climate change! Water is still a mystery and we still make new discoveries about water (I reported here before under the label "science of water")!

"Scientists have created a new type of ice that matches the density and structure of water, perhaps opening a door to studying water’s mysterious properties.

“It might be liquid water frozen in time,” ...

The ice is called medium-density amorphous ice. The team that created it ... shook regular ice in a small container with centimetre-wide stainless-steel balls at temperatures of –200 ˚C to produce the variant, which has never been seen before. The ice appeared as a white granular powder that stuck to the metal balls. ...

Normally, when water freezes, it crystallizes and its molecules are arranged into the familiar hexagonal, solid structure that we call ice. Ice is less dense than its liquid form — an unusual property for a crystal. Depending on conditions such as pressure and the speed of freezing, water can also solidify in any of two dozen other regular arrangements. Amorphous ice is different: it has no such order. “You have lots of molecules joining on haphazardly,” says Chaplin.

Two types of amorphous ice have been previously discovered, both in the twentieth century. ‘Low-density’ amorphous ice is the result of water vapour freezing onto a very cold surface, at a temperature lower than –150 ˚C; ‘high-density’ amorphous ice forms by compressing ordinary ice at similar temperatures under high pressure. Although neither type is common on Earth, both are plentiful in space. “Comets are big chunks of low-density amorphous ice,” ..."

From the abstract:

"Amorphous ices govern a range of cosmological processes and are potentially key materials for explaining the anomalies of liquid water. A substantial density gap between low-density and high-density amorphous ice with liquid water in the middle is a cornerstone of our current understanding of water. However, we show that ball milling “ordinary” ice Ih at low temperature gives a structurally distinct medium-density amorphous ice (MDA) within this density gap. These results raise the possibility that MDA is the true glassy state of liquid water or alternatively a heavily sheared crystalline state. Notably, the compression of MDA at low temperature leads to a sharp increase of its recrystallization enthalpy, highlighting that H2O can be a high-energy geophysical material."

Scientists made a new kind of ice that might exist on distant moons The 'amorphous' solid is denser and could be water ‘frozen in time’.

Medium-density amorphous ice (no public access)

Milling ordinary ice with steel balls disrupted its crystalline structure and led to a novel, denser version of solid water.