  A generally accepted understanding of the anomalous properties of water will
only emerge if it becomes possible to systematically characterize water in the
deeply supercooled regime, from where the anomalies appear to emanate. This has
largely remained elusive because water crystallizes rapidly between 160 K and
232 K. Here, we present an experimental approach to rapidly prepare deeply
supercooled water at a well-defined temperature and probe it with electron
diffraction before crystallization occurs. We show that as water is cooled from
room temperature to cryogenic temperature, its structure evolves smoothly,
approaching that of amorphous ice just below 200 K. Our experiments narrow down
the range of possible explanations of the origin for the water anomalies and
open up new avenues for studying supercooled water.
