“And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!”
Ice is an enormously unusual substance. Just about every substance shrinks when it gets cold, but not water; it expands by 8%. Were that not so — if ice occupied less space than water — then ice would sink to the bottom of bodies of water. The bottoms of the oceans would have been blanketed with ice early in our planet’s creation, preventing life as we know it from ever evolving. Now comes news that researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have demonstrated that subjecting water to extreme, sudden pressure can cause it to a) heat above the boiling point b) freeze and c) shrink, all in a few nanoseconds. With fourteen different kinds of ice, no doubt there’s a lot about it that remains to be discovered. And don’t even ask why ice is slippery: nobody knows.
7 Comments