In the dog days of summer, popping a tray of water into the freezer to make ice cubes may seem mundane. But at the smallest scales, we still don’t know a lot about how freezing unfolds. Now, the first ever molecular-scale movies of ice reveal that the resulting crystal is surprisingly flexible, researchers report September 25 in Nature Communications.
The transformation of liquid water into ice is a fundamental process on Earth and beyond. The freezing process and the stability of ice are vital to atmospheric processes, transportation safety and the preservation of biological tissue. To better understand what stabilizes and what weakens ice, materials scientist Jingshan Du and