'Alien ice' created on Earth for first time
WASHINGTON - A strange form of ice has been captured being frozen from water in real time on Earth for the first time, US researchers said on Tuesday.
In a study published online in the US journal Physical Review Letters, researchers at the Stanford University described how Ice VII, or Ice Seven, which normally forms in environments such as when icy planetary bodies collide, was created and imaged in the lab in just billionths of a second.
"These experiments with water are the first of their kind, allowing us to witness a fundamental disorder-to-order transition in one of the most abundant molecules in the universe," says the study's lead author, Arianna Gleason, a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a visiting scientist in the Extreme Environments Laboratory of Stanford's School of Earth, Energy&Environmental Sciences.
