# Scientists Discover New Form of Ice That Exists Above 3,600 Degrees > Source: https://buzzwiredaily.com/scientists-discover-new-form-of-ice-that-exists-above-3600-degrees/ > Author: Ronald Jeferson > Published: 2026-09-14 > Modified: 2026-09-14 Scientists have created a new form of ice that stays solid above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. The feat sounds impossible. Water that hot should be vapor, if not torn apart into atoms. But under crushing pressure, it turned into something researchers call superionic ice. French researchers made it by squeezing water between diamond tips at more than 2 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure, according to [Dexerto's reporting on the discovery](https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/scientists-discover-a-new-type-of-ice-that-forms-at-more-than-3600f-3408662/). The diamonds acted as a vise. Lasers supplied the heat. What came out was neither fully solid nor fully liquid. https://twitter.com/Dexerto/status/2099532400078303408 The numbers behind the new form of ice are hard to picture. One laboratory run pushed pressures to 2.3 million atmospheres and temperatures to 2,630 kelvins, which works out to 2,357 degrees Celsius or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit, according to [ScienceAlert's account of the experiment](https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-create-a-new-form-of-ice-at-more-than-2000-c). At those temperatures water would normally expand into gas in an instant. Under millions of atmospheres of pressure, expansion has nowhere to go. So the water stays dense and takes on exotic structure instead. Superionic ice earns its strange name from how its atoms behave. The oxygen atoms lock into a rigid crystal lattice the way they would in ordinary solid ice. The hydrogen nuclei stay mobile and drift through that lattice much like particles in a liquid. The result conducts electricity almost like a metal. Some descriptions even call it black ice, because of how it looks under laboratory observation. This was predicted long before anyone made it. Theorists described a superionic water state back in 1988. In 2005 a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory smashed water between diamonds and heated it with lasers, then reported frequency shifts that pointed to a phase transition. The first definitive evidence for the oxygen lattice structure came from X ray measurements on laser shocked water in 2019. Each step tightened the case that this odd state of matter is real. Confirmation arrived in 2018 when laboratory teams compressed water in diamond anvil cells and blasted the samples with lasers for less than a billionth of a second. Conditions inside the cell briefly matched the deep interiors of giant planets. The current flowing through the sample was carried by ions rather than electrons. That detail matters. It showed the water was truly superionic and not some hot conductive fluid. Why go to all this trouble for ice. Because Uranus and Neptune may be full of it. Scientists have long theorized that the ice giants hold a thick layer of superionic water deep inside, according to [IFLScience's coverage of the planetary connection](https://www.iflscience.com/ice-hotter-than-molten-steel-exists-inside-neptune-and-uranus-scientists-finally-recreated-it-in-the-lab-84643). That hidden layer could explain the planets' odd magnetic fields, which tilt and wobble in ways Earth's does not. Recreating the material on Earth lets researchers test those ideas against something they can measure. The experimental toolkit keeps improving. Diamond anvil cells trap tiny samples at millions of atmospheres. High powered lasers dump heat into the sample in fractions of a second. X ray crystallography reads the oxygen lattice before the whole thing blows apart. Computer models from Berkeley and Livermore predicted which crystal shapes should appear at which pressures, including body centered cubic arrangements above 50 gigapascals and face centered cubic forms at even higher pressures and temperatures above 2,000 kelvins. Water keeps surprising the people who study it. It expands when it freezes. Its surface tension and boiling point sit far from where simple chemistry says they should. It should be a gas at room temperature based on molecular weight alone. Add pressure and the weirdness multiplies into more than twenty known crystalline phases, plus glassy forms with no crystal order at all. Breakthroughs in the lab now arrive at machine speed, much like [the AI driven discovery of new materials in hours that is reshaping science](https://buzzwiredaily.com/ai-discovers-new-materials-in-hours-revolutionizing-science/). What comes next is refinement. Researchers want cleaner measurements of conductivity, sharper maps of where each crystal phase begins and ends, and better models of how a superionic layer would churn inside a real planet. Each answer feeds planetary science. Missions to the outer solar system take decades to plan. Laboratory ice that behaves like Neptune's interior arrives much sooner. For now the headline stands on its own. Ice that survives temperatures hotter than molten steel. Made by crushing water between diamonds. Pointing straight at the hearts of distant worlds. Not bad for the most ordinary liquid on Earth. 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