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regular_modern_girl t1_is3mrx1 wrote

ice-Ih (the only form of water ice that occurs naturally in terrestrial conditions) is a weird solid in that it’s actually by definition significantly less dense than its liquid phase, due to peculiarities of its crystal structure.

This actually leads to a number of peculiarities when it comes to ice (the common earthly form of it, at least), such as that it floats on liquid water, it takes up more volume than liquid water, and that higher pressures actually generally melt it by lowering its freezing point (the exact opposite of how most crystalline solids work).

If we were talking about almost any substance other than water here (or talking about very different conditions than Earth) then what you’re saying here would be largely correct, but water (and especially ice-Ih) is just really weird like this.

EDIT: I forgot that ice-Ic (the cubic crystal form of ice-I) is hypothesized to occur naturally in tiny amounts in the upper atmosphere, and trace amounts of ice-VII (one of the high-pressure variants) have been found as natural inclusions in diamonds as a user below just informed me, but obviously neither of these things are really relevant to the argument at hand. Ice-Ih is still the only one we encounter in daily life, and the only one to occur in substantial quantities in nature here on Earth. The full water ice “zoo” that we’ve managed to synthesize in lab conditions up to this point consists of something like 20 or so different crystalline forms (I think depending somewhat on how exactly you distinguish some of the structures), as well as non-crystalline amorphous ice (which has a disordered molecular structure like glass, occurs in very low pressure conditions, and might actually be the most common form of water across the universe).

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