Crystal Phases

Researchers probe the surprisingly complicated science of ice

- Meghan Bartels

CHANCES ARE THAT ALL your encounters with frozen water—while trudging through slushy winter streets, perhaps, or treating yourself to cool summer lemonades—have been confined to one structural form of ice, dubbed Ih, with the h referring to its crystal lattice’s hexagonal nature. But there is so much more to ice than that.

For more than a century scientists have been striving to push ice into extreme conditions, creating progressively more exotic structures—they’ve made more than 20 crystalline forms to date, in fact, none of which we are likely to experience in our lifetimes.

“Water is a beautiful, elegant system that consistently shows new, remarkable behavior,” says Ashkan Salamat, a physical chemist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “For something so simple, it has beautiful complexity.”