Scientists Transformed Pure Water Into a Metal - And There's Video

Story by Michelle Starr • 8h

Pure water is an almost perfect insulator.

Yes, water found in nature conducts electricity – but that's because of the impurities therein, which dissolve into free ions that allow an electric current to flow. Pure water only becomes "metallic" – electronically conductive – at extremely high pressures, beyond our current abilities to produce in a lab.
But, as researchers demonstrated for the first time back in 2021, it's not only high pressures that can induce this metallicity in pure water.

By bringing pure water into contact with an electron-sharing alkali metal – in this case an alloy of sodium and potassium – free-moving charged particles can be added, turning water metallic.
The resulting conductivity only lasts a few seconds, but it's a significant step towards being able to understand this phase of water by studying it directly.

"You can see the phase transition to metallic water with the naked eye!" physicist Robert Seidel from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie in Germany explained in 2021 when the research was published.

. . .

Under high enough pressures, pretty much any material could theoretically become conductive.

The idea is that if you squeeze the atoms together tightly enough, the orbitals of the outer electrons would start to overlap, allowing them to move around. For water, this pressure is around 48 megabars – just under 48 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.

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