Could Ice VII (hot ice) be responsible for seeding life on our planet?
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The common or garden ice we find on Earth is just one type of ice that we know of in our universe. An exotic form of ice, known as ice VII, has been manufactured in a laboratory using, water, quartz, diamonds and an incredibly powerful laser.
Hot ice (Ice VII), is termed such, because of its ability to remain intact at high temperatures, exceeding 350 degrees Celsius. It is believed that hot ice exists in the deep layers of Neptune and Uranus. On these planets water is exposed to much greater pressures which causes the formation of hot ice. In fact hot ice is formed at the equivalent of 30000 Earth atmospheres (Cosmosmagazine.com, July, 2017)
In an article, in New Scientist Magazine – Hot ice could have seeded life on Earth – it has been identified that the formation of hot ice has been observed in laboratory conditions. To create the hot ice a team of researchers simulated the types of pressures that water might be exposed to if it were involved in a colission between a comet and a planet (New Scientist, July, 2017).
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The research, also highlighted by cosmosmagazine.com, was conducted by Arianna Gleason, with the Shock and Detonation Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and has been published in Physical Review Letters (Cosmosmagazine, July, 2017).
To simulate the comet impact the researches sandwiched water between two sheets of quartz. They then place a diamond next to the water and vaporised the diamond with an immensely powerful green laser. The shockwave from the vaporised diamond recreated the effects of a comet impact. Although the formation of the exotic ice was only observed over a 6 nanosecond period, it demonstrated that hot ice may have appeared naturally on Earth, as a result of a comet impact (New Scientist, July, 2017).
Consequently, it’s possible that if this type of ice was mixed with salt, on the surface of a planet, it may have catalysed the beginning of the complex protien structures required for the flourishing of life. This new hypothesis, is an alternative to the panspermia scenario,which claims that biotic material was actually transported to Earth on a comet. Moreover, it is not inconceivable that this prebiotic soup – ‘could exist on Europa, Titan and Enceladus’ (New Scientist, July, 2017).
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