What does an ice crystal look like?
Well, many crystalline forms of ice are known, but which of these crystals is actually formed depends on the temperature and the pressure under which the ice is formed. The most common type of ice on the earth is called ice type I. The other types are mostly artificially produced in a lab and therefore they are not very important. Ice I is the kind that cools our drinks in summer as an ice cube or obstructs our roads in winter as black ice. Its structure is shown in the picture below: The red atoms represent the oxygen, and the white, smaller ones are hydrogen. In the picture you can also see that the respective H2O-molecules are linked through additional bonds. These bonds are responsible for the solid nature of ice. At the same time you can derive further characteristics of ice by looking at the crystal lattice. For example, the characteristic that ice is able to float. You can easily spot that there is a lot of space between the molecules that are linked in the ice, which is totally
