SellaTheChemistIf anyone is into #StrangeIce my friend and colleague Christoph Salzmann and I will be talking about one of the strangest of strange ices on BBC World Service's Inside Science later tonight, with additional ice talk from Europa and beyond. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct36b9
Our #StrangeIce paper is out in Science. Medium density amorphous ice. It doesn’t float. It doesn’t sink. The density is like water yet the atoms cannot move. It’s made by ball milling “normal” ice at -200 degrees and has lost almost all trace of its original crystalline structure. And if you squeeze it, it stores mechanical energy, an observation that may have implications for worlds like Europa where tidal forces drive mechanical shearing. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq2105
Martin Vermeer FCD@sellathechemist Is this one of Bridgman's ices?
@martinvermeer No. Bridgman's and the others were all crystalline and made a higher pressures, although you can make high density amorphous ice is you overdo the squeezing. This is a normal pressure ice, pretty completely amorphous, made by shearing and shearing and shearing crystals over and over. Because the Hydrogens are disordered in "normal" ice, the ice cannot reassemble when you slide the layers of molecules past each other. So the material densifies with each successive shearing…