Scientists have discovered a form of water ice that was not previously known to occur naturally on our planet, trapped in the rigid structure of diamonds, which are formed deep in the Earth’s crust. The new study was published Thursday in Science, and represents the first detection of naturally occurring ice-VII ever found on Earth. It was discovered entirely by accident. According to The Los Angeles Times, ice-VII is about one and a half times as dense as the regular ice we put in our drinks or skate on in the winter. Plus, the crystalline structure of its atoms are different: instead of the oxygen atoms being arranged in a hexagonal shape, they are arranged in a cubic shape. Ice-VII also remains fairly stable even as the pressure increases. Scientists believe that ice-VII may be found in the solar system, but it was not thought to naturally occur on Earth. But diamonds can form very deep in the Earth’s mantle, as much as 400 miles beneath the crust, reports LA Times. And as part of their formation process, they will occasionally encapsulate teeny bits of the chemical environment around them, so when they are eventually transported to the surface of the Earth, they also bring up other deep-Earth materials. “Water in diamonds is not unknown, but finding this very high pressure form of water ice intact, that was really fortuitous,” said George Rossman, a mineralogist at Caltech who worked on the study. “That’s what you call discovery.”
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