Ice may seem like one of the most familiar and ordinary substances on Earth, but new research has revealed an astonishing property.
A study published in Nature Physics has shown that ice can generate electricity when bent or deformed.
This phenomenon, known as flexoelectricity, could help explain natural events such as lightning and may even inspire new technologies.
Ice is everywhere—covering mountaintops, filling glaciers, and stretching across polar ice caps. Yet despite its abundance, scientists continue to uncover surprising details about its behavior.
In an international collaboration, researchers from ICN2 in Spain, Xi’an Jiaotong University in China, and Stony Brook University in the United States demonstrated for the first time that ordinary frozen water is a flexoelectric material.
In simple terms, flexoelectric materials generate electric charges when they are bent or unevenly deformed. The team discovered that this property holds true for ice across all temperatures, up to its melting point.
At extremely low temperatures, below –113ºC, they also found something even more unusual: a thin layer at the surface of the ice behaves like a “ferroelectric” material.
This means the surface can develop a natural electric polarization, which can be reversed if an external electric field is applied—similar to flipping the poles of a magnet.
“This means that ice has not just one way to generate electricity, but two,” explained Dr. Xin Wen, one of the study’s lead researchers. “At very low temperatures, the surface shows ferroelectricity, and at higher temperatures, all the way to 0ºC, it shows flexoelectricity.”
The discovery puts ice in the same category as advanced electroceramic materials such as titanium dioxide, which are already widely used in technologies like sensors and capacitors. But unlike those synthetic materials, ice is natural, abundant, and already present in huge quantities across the planet.
One of the most exciting implications of the finding is its connection to thunderstorms. Scientists have long known that lightning forms when ice particles in clouds collide and build up an electric charge.
However, the exact mechanism behind this charging has been uncertain, because ice is not piezoelectric—it does not generate charge simply by being compressed. The new study suggests that when ice particles bend or deform irregularly during collisions, they generate electricity through flexoelectricity.
“Our measurements of bent ice slabs matched the kind of electric potentials observed in thunderstorms,” said Professor Gustau Catalán of ICN2. “This points to flexoelectricity as a possible explanation for how lightning begins.”
Beyond explaining a long-standing mystery of nature, the discovery could open doors to future technologies.
Researchers are already exploring ways to harness ice’s electromechanical properties to create new electronic devices. In theory, such devices could even be fabricated directly in cold environments, where ice remains stable.
For now, the idea of using frozen water as an electronic material may sound futuristic. But this breakthrough shows that even the most familiar substances still have secrets to reveal—ones that could reshape both our understanding of nature and the future of technology.
