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I was reading this question that states ice is less dense than water because of the crystal structure being rigidly ordered and more far apart than in the liquid state. If this happens when ice naturally formed, what if you tried to force ice to form in a more packed-together structure? Could you try and create ice that is more dense than water in this way?

Riley Halifax
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There are many phases of "ice" that are denser than water. The most (in)famous is the fictional ice nine. Ther is a real ice nine that is not not known to be so lethal.

mike stone
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At the current state of the art, it is not possible to get ice denser than water when you have ordinary winter conditions. With that I mean temperatures and pressures you encounter on Earth during winter when the ordinary ice I forms.

You can change either temperature or pressure to get ice denser than water.

  • When you increase pressure to ~ 1 GPa, you get ice VI, which has density of 1.31 g/cm^3.
  • When you decrease temperature to ~ 77 K (liquid nitrogen) and crush the ice, you can get amorphous ice with density above 1 g/cm^3.

None of currently known structures remain in that denser form when temperature and pressure are relaxed to ordinary conditions.

However, note that medium density amorphous ice was discovered only in 2023, so I guess it might be possible that some ice configuration is found that would be denser than water and (meta)stable at "Earth conditions".

Zizy Archer
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