Scientists Are Making Alien Ice

The ice inside Neptune is hot, black, and may cause the planet to rain diamonds. Turns out ice has a bunch of alien forms. And now we're making that ice here on Earth. At its core, ice is just a bunch of water molecules held together by the hydrogen atoms. On Earth, that typically looks like this, neatly formed hexagons. But these hydrogen bonds are pretty sensitive to changes in pressure and temperature. So if you mess with those two things, you can get all kinds of cool alien ice. And scientists love to mess with things. In 2019, they used diamonds and lasers to put water molecules under extreme temperature and pressure. And that pressure compressed the oxygen atoms into a lattice, making a solid. And the extreme heat broke down the hydrogen bonds, causing them to zoom around. And all of that chaos stopped light from getting through, making the ice look super dark. And boom, Neptune's weird, hot black ice here on Earth. But they didn't stop there. That was ice 18. As of 2025, they're up to ice 21. And every new form is teaching us a little bit more about the icy worlds away from home. And we have a plan to drill into one of those icy worlds.