IN THE past year, we discovered an entirely new kind of ice. Frozen water is usually found with its atoms arranged in a regular tetrahedral lattice. But if you chill it to 鈭�200掳C and bombard it with small steel balls, the ice becomes disordered and amorphous.
In fact, there are two other amorphous types of ice (high and low density 鈥� this new one has a medium density, almost the same as that of water), and we also know of at least 18 crystalline 鈥減hases鈥� other than regular ice, strange configurations that exist fugitively under high pressure in lab conditions, in Earth鈥檚 mantle or in space. The most recent of these was only in 2021 .
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It might seem weird that we are still discovering new things about ice, but it is somehow both bizarre and fitting that H2O is still so poorly understood. Water, the foundation of all life, is an exceptional substance. And since the start of human history, ice has been seen as miraculous. The 9th-century hermit is said to have performed a miracle and made fire from icicles en route to becoming the patron saint of Nuremberg. And a 10th-century Saxon runs: 鈥淭he wave, over the wave, a weird thing I saw, / through-wrought, and wonderfully ornate: / a wonder on the wave 鈥� water become bone.鈥�
By this period, it had been known for a thousand years in China that snowflakes are six-sided (people may have spied this using magnifying lenses), but this fact passed unnoticed in the West until the glimmers of the scientific revolution in the 17th century. In his pamphlet De Nive Sexangula in 1611, Johannes Kepler wondered if this six-sidedness was inherent, and considered the arrangement of seeds inside a pomegranate as a possible model for what was happening on an invisibly smaller scale. It was, you might say, our first glimpse of the building blocks of the universe.
Kepler wasn鈥檛 alone in his curiosity. Ren茅 Descartes also studied snowflakes, while Francis Bacon wrote: 鈥渨hosoever will be an Enquirer into Nature, let him resort to a Conservatory of Snow or Ice鈥�. And later, in the mid-17th century, Robert Hooke revealed the stark beauty of this hidden world with his microscope.
But it is Hooke鈥檚 contemporary Robert Boyle whose interest in ice was the most enlightening. In experiments conducted over a decade or more, he used ice as a tool to investigate the phenomenon of cold. (Heat is simple to produce, but cold is far more difficult to explain, or to conjure up.) Boyle also froze various substances, including food and drink 鈥� iced beer was 鈥渄ispirited like phlegm鈥�, he found 鈥� experiments that presage a practice that is vital to the modern world.
These days, of course, ice is no longer extraordinary: it is a commodity we quietly grow in a small box in the corner of the kitchen and consume at will. A substance that is now figuratively as well as literally almost invisible to us. Yet, as the new discoveries show, there is still so much more to learn.
The news about medium-density amorphous ice came amid an Antarctic winter season in which maximum sea ice extent hit a historic low. These facts aren鈥檛 connected, but to me, at least, they throw each other into sharp relief. Ice has been our companion throughout history in our attempts to live in and make sense of the world, crucial to our appreciation of both the strangeness of the cosmos and its fundamental order. What if we are losing even more than we can know?
Perhaps we should all try to see, in the mundane ice cubes that clink in our drinks, something of the awe and mysticism of our earliest encounters with ice, in order that we might cherish and protect it better.
Max Leonard is the author of聽.听蔼尘冲虫濒
