Overview

This Volume, the last of the series, is devoted to water in its metastable forms, especially at sub-zero temperatures. The past few years have wit- nessed an increasing interest in supercooled water and amorphous ice. If the properties of liquid water in the normal temperature range are already eccentric, then they become exceedingly so below the normal freezing point, in the metastable temperature range. Water can be supercooled to -39 C without too much effort, and most of its physical properties show a re- markable temperature dependence under these conditions. Although ade- quate explanations are still lacking, the time has come to review available knowledge. The study of amorphous ice, that is, the solid formed when water vapor is condensed on a very cold surface, is of longer standing. It has achieved renewed interest because it may serve as a model for the liquid state. There is currently a debate whether or not a close structural relation- ship exists between amorphous ice and supercooled water. The nucleation and growth of ice in supercooled water and aqueous solutions is also still one of those grey areas of research, although these topics have received considerable attention from chemists and physicists over the past two decades. Even now, the relationships between degree of supercooling, nucleation kinetics, crystal growth kinetics, cooling rate and solute concentration are somewhat obscure. Nevertheless, at the empirical level much progress has been made, because these topics are of considerable importance to biologists, technologists, atmospheric physicists and gla- ciologists.