Scientists Discover Amorphous Ice That Resembles Liquid Water - Gizmodo
“The accepted wisdom has been that no ice exists within that density gap,” Salzmann added.
As a result, MDA looks like white powder; though it is a solid, it has the molecular composition of liquid water.“We shook the ice like crazy for a long time and destroyed the crystal structure,” said Alexander Rosu-Finsen, a researcher at UCL and the study’s lead author, in the same release.“Rather than ending up with smaller pieces of ice, we realized that we had come up with an entirely new kind of thing, with some remarkable properties.”MDA had a final quirk: When the material recrystallized into ordinary water ice, it released a large amount of heat.The researchers believe the discovery could have geophysical implications for ice on the surfaces of frozen moons like Europa, to which NASA is scheduled to launch an orbiter in 2024.