Oren and AndreasT thank you for your responses to my stupid question. But it is the nature of things that the difference between stupid and genius is that genius has limits. Thus I have tons more questions.
I recently set my refrigerator to too low a setting and everything froze except the bottles of soft drinks. But when I opened a bottle it immediately filled with ice. It seemed to be more ice than could be accounted for by merely the temperature change of the expanding gas. It seems pressure can constrain freezing as it does boiling. The pressure at the depth of 10 meters, I would assume, are greater than the pressure in my drink bottle. Could the water absorb or release a great amount of latent energy without temperature change or phase change?
I'll chime in from a background of moderate general science literacy. I think the soda bottle experience is only distantly related. I suspect the answer to your final guestion (at least for a "great amount" of latent energy is "no."
What's going on with the soda bottle is not that the pressure on water molecules is preventing ice formation (much), but that the pressure on CO2 molecules is tending to force them to stay in solution, rather than bubbling out. The physical process of ice crystal formation requires that other molecules (salt ions, sugar molecules, CO2, whatever) be forced out of the expanding crystals. The higher the molar amount of foreign dissolved molecules, the colder the temp has to be to allow crystals to form.
Your very cold but liquid soda bottles would freeze instantly when pressure is released only because CO2 can then immediately bubble out of solution. Instantly removed from the water, the temp at which ice can form is substantially above current temp. If I'm correct in this thinking. a temperature reading of the new ice would be at or below 0 degrees C, but higher than the ambient temp in the refrigerator.
A corollary to all this is that any gas is much more soluble at great ocean depth than at the surface. This has some relevance for climate issues with methane, which dissolves into water if released at great ocean depth, but bubbles to the surface when released from shallower waters.