Chances are that all your encounters with frozen water—while trudging through slushy winter streets, perhaps, or treating yourself to cool summer lemonades—have been confined to one structural form of ice, dubbed Ih, with the h referring to its crystal lattice’s hexagonal nature. But there is so much more to ice than that.

At the start of the year, Earth will quietly reach a milestone in its orbit around the sun. Known as perihelion, this is the moment when our planet is closer to the sun than at any other point in the year.

Water is all around us, yet its surface layer—home to chemical reactions that shape life on Earth—is surprisingly hard to study. Experiments at SLAC's X-ray laser are bringing it into focus.