At this point, this is a silly semantic debate over what counts at “regular”.

It’s different from regular ice. It doesn’t have crystalline structure like you can find in all other ice forms on Earth.

In space, it could flash freeze under a low pressure and at a faster rate possible than normally achievable in a lab.

Normally water has to crystallize as it becomes solid. The liquid gets cold enough and you have crystals nucleate out and then all the rest of the molecules will fall in line over time. It’s pretty common to see online people mess with this thermodynamic process and make “flash freezing” water where basically the first crystal just hasn’t nucleated yet, since it needs a little kinetic push. So it stays a liquid until suddenly boom one crystal nucleates out it immediately freezes.

This ice is like there is no crystal that nucleates, and the water just… freezes anyway. Which is not a stable state thermodynamically speaking.

It’s like forcing all these molecules in a horribly close and weird arrangement and just keeping them there.

Crushed ice is just crushed ice. Idk where you’re getting that from.

It’s literally not crushed ice.

Crushed ice is just small bits of crystalline ice.

This isn’t crystalline at all. It’s amorphous. So rather than the molecules lining up in a repeat unit like nice little toy soldiers, they’re all over the place like flash mob on pcp.

That’s so cool that this exists, but it’s not surprising crystallization releases heat. That’s an exothermic process.

Makes me think of amorphous metals.

Haven’t looked at those things though since a material science recruitment demo where we bounced a rubber ball off one. (Amorphous structure absorbs less kinetic energy than a crystalline one so you get way more bounce off an amorphous metal surface than a crystalline one, which looks real weird)

They let perfection be the enemy of progress there it seems…