Scientists Create a New Form of Ice At 2,357 Degrees Celsius

Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet — under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit). […] In their new experiments, a team led by physicist Alexis Forestier of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission subjected tiny samples of water to the sorts of extreme conditions expected in the interiors of ice giant planets.

They squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That’s 2.3 million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level â” the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals. Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.

What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins. [Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets’ equally unusual magnetic fields.] The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters.