00:04Ice cubes are our most common way of shaping ice to cool our drinks, but in nature water forming into
00:09cubic ice is rare, and thought to possibly not even happen at all.
00:12ScienceLit reports that while ice can freeze in a number of ways, any discoveries of cubic ice in nature could
00:17actually be the freezing of other structural shapes that only end up looking cubic in the end.
00:22But now researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences say they have created cubic ice in a lab, and despite
00:27sounding kind of silly, it actually has wide-reaching implications.
00:31This is how ice generally forms, in a multitude of outstretching hexagonal crystals.
00:35But when the researchers froze water on 2D sheets of graphene, the majority of the ice crystals froze in tiny
00:41cubic shapes.
00:42What's more, the cubic ice remained cubic throughout the experiment, and didn't change phases during the consistent minus 276 degree
00:49Fahrenheit conditions.
00:50The researchers say this tells us what conditions the cubic ice is more likely to occur at, specifically, extremely cold
00:56ones.
00:57But those are the same conditions that are present in our upper atmosphere, which the researchers say is also important
01:02for understanding how things freeze at extremely dramatic temperatures.
01:05Something they say could be crucial in better understanding the process of cryopreservation and ice at a molecular level.
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