I am planning to have my characters go to the bottom of a sea deep enough that ice VI or VII forms at the bottom. Is there any precedent for this in fiction? Right now I'd just write it as regular (but warm) ice forming a oceanic floor, but I want to do better than that. Let's say that the ice continues down for ten times the height of the ocean above it. What happens to it?
I've not heard of such a thing in fiction, but I can tell you about Ice VII. It's much denser than water, so it'll always sink. It requires extreme pressure to create. Earth's oceans, for example, are simple not deep enough to form anything like these exotic forms of ice. I'm confused by your last statement. Are you asking that if you took a piece of Ice VII from some location on your seabed and dropped it down to 10x the depth, what would happen to it? The answer depends on the pressure and temperature, as Ice VII can turn into either Ice X or Ice VIII. Ice VII is only really stable above about 0 degrees C. As you get deeper in your ocean, I'd assume that the temperature would drop faster than the pressure would increase, so it'd first turn into Ice VIII. Then, at around 10 million pounds per square inch (4200 miles of water on Earth) you'd get Ice X. This type of ice is expected to be fairly common in the universe. We've discovered a number of planets that we think are small rocky worlds like our but covered in thousands of miles of water.
I'm going to close this thread. You are all going to pretend I was never here. I only need one kind of ice in my world. It goes in my soda pop--and only to avoid it fizzing too much when I pour. >.>
The secret is to not pour over ice. Pour carefully in a clean glass, then gently lower the ice cubes into the liquid. You keep all the CO₂ intact.
Oh, fountain drinks work differently. I’ve tried looking into it, but never got an answer. If you poured a bottled coke over crushed ice from the same height, it would foam over and ruin the taste as well as make a mess.
I'm asking about how ice VI would behave in real life. Surely a seabed made of ice would look differently than one made of rocks. What would it take to bore through such a material? What temperature would the seabed and ice underneath be? Could you take a piece of it back to the surface? Not exactly. I'm asking about if the ice itself extends down ten times, or a hundred times deeper than the seabed. What would happen if you traveled through it? How would it behave? Also, I don't get why it would just keep cooling the farther down you got. Would immense pressure not create heat all on its own?
Gotcha. Okay, so Ice 6 is fairly unstable and is usually created from liquid. It’d be difficult or impossible for other types of ice to become Ice 6, so it’d have to form that way. The ice would be only slightly different than what you’re used to. It’ll act like rock. It’s slightly less brittle than regular ice because of the way the molecules line up. It’s a regular pattern, but not terribly stable and will shift and move more like a metal than anything. This is not strange, even regular ice behaves like rock when deep frozen. Google pictures taken by the Heuygens probe from the surface of Titan. All those mountain and rocks, are actually water ice. In terms of techtonics or drilling, it would act like soft rock, maybe like sandstone. Higher densities of ice behave similarly, and as a rule of thumb the higher the pressure, the more metal-like it becomes. If you pile Ice 7 up, both heat and pressure skyrocket. Pressure should add up faster than temperature though so you’d end up with layers. The outer most layer would be liquid water or regular ice depending on the atmospheric temp/pressure, then ice 7, then ice x and finally ice XI. If you have enough water, the temperature may increase high enough deep under that ice XI layer to have another liquid water layer. That would extend until the pressure got so great that no amount of heat could overcome it and the final layer would be ice XI. These exotic forms of ice are expected to exist in various places in our own solar system. Titan, Europa, Ganyemede, Enceladus, Triton, Pluto are all expected to have this onion-like layering. Those I don’t think any of them are big enough to reach ice XI.
Thank you good sir. Two more questions: 1. What determines if water becomes ice 6 or 7? The way you talk about them make them seem like they're mutually exclusive. 2. Is there any diagram showing the depths at which all these phenomena occur? Or even one showing pressure/heat in oceans deeper than any on Earth?
Sure, attached is a phase diagram. The transitions are more complex that they appear here but for the most part, ice changes type when it crosses one of those lines. The only weird part is that some of those lines only go one way, for example if you take the pressure off of ice VII, it will go straight to water and bypass Ice VI. I’m not sure where you can find info on all of those, I only know it because of the physics of who the atoms will arrange themselves. The major factor between becoming ice 6 or 7 is temperature. 7 can form at much higher temperatures because it’s not really “frozen” in the sense that regular ice or ice VI is, it’s more that it’s pushed together so hard that nothing can move. That’s why 7 is expected inside of icy planets and moons, temperature is fairly high but so is the pressure.
