New Seismic-Radar Method Reveals Hidden Dangers Beneath Arctic Ice

Credit: Gabriel Rocha Dos Santos

What does drifting sea ice sound like when it crashes into coastal formations? Eerie, according to researchers who've been listening. And those sounds might just save lives.

Penn State scientists have developed an innovative method that combines seismic sensors, fiber-optic cables, and radar imagery to decode the movements and dangers of Arctic sea ice. By literally listening to ice collisions and matching them with visual observations, they've created a new tool that could help vulnerable coastal communities anticipate threats from shifting ice.

The research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, comes at a critical time. Arctic sea ice coverage sits at one of its lowest levels on record, yet scientists still can't agree on when summer ice will disappear completely. Understanding what remains – how it moves, what dangers it poses – has become increasingly urgent.

Drifting sea ice poses serious threats to Arctic communities and infrastructure. When massive chunks break free and crash into stable landfast ice where people live and work, the results can be catastrophic. But predicting these events has been notoriously difficult given the harsh conditions that limit conventional monitoring.

Tieyuan Zhu, associate professor of geosciences at Penn State and corresponding author on the study, says the new method helps communities understand the scope, strength, and hazards of ice movements during different seasons. "This work creates a foundation to assess threats from particular kinds of sea ice that drift at different times of year. April tends to see smaller but more chunks of ice. In January, they tend to be the strongest."

Zhu and Gabriel Rocha Dos Santos, a doctoral candidate and the paper's first author, focused their study near Utqiaġvik, a town of roughly forty-nine hundred residents in northern Alaska. The region is known as the land of fast ice – referring to landfast ice anchored to the ground while smaller sea ice travels on wind and ocean currents.

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The researchers collected seismic and radar data from two major ice collision events: one on January fourth, twenty twenty-two, and another on April eighth of the same year. Each involved large chunks of drifting sea ice striking stationary, landbound ice.

To capture seismic activity during these strikes, the team employed two mechanisms. Broadband seismometers recorded ground motion, while fiber-optic cables laid across the tundra used acoustics to capture longer-distance seismic patterns. Merging these insights with radar-derived visual observations allowed them to identify different types of ice-to-ice impacts and associate them with distinct seismic tremors.

The tremors revealed fascinating patterns. During the April event, smaller ice chunks generated more intermittent, short-lived tremors despite robust overall ice cover. Three months earlier, when large, dense ice packs accumulated, researchers detected harmonic tremors – more constant vibrations indicating sustained contact and friction.

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Zhu describes these findings as the first evidence linking specific types of Arctic ice and individual ice interactions to particular seismic signals. But the team went further, converting seismic data to audio to create an alternative way to interpret and share their findings.

"We could hear the vibration, the tremor," Dos Santos explained. "It's a very eerie sound when you speed up the recordings to two hundred times the ice's actual rate of movement."

Accelerating playback helps distinguish variations in ice friction and gliding that occur over hours-long periods. Some lower-frequency recordings from April appeared to correlate with lower-velocity movement when drifting and stationary ice had locked together. The sustained harmonic tremor in January mirrored larger-mass impacts and greater momentum transfer.

"Radar images provide useful visuals, but we needed the seismic data to show what's happening away from the surface, away from the camera lens," Zhu said.

The implications for coastal safety are significant. Zhu estimates that Utqiaġvik residents live as close as one hundred feet from the coast, leaving them especially vulnerable to erosion and waves created by drifting ice. In a rapidly changing Arctic where ice continues breaking apart and striking coastal areas, this multi-sensor approach could help communities better evaluate immediate hazards.

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The insights also benefit those who make their living in the region. Fishermen depend on sea ice as a fishing platform and need to know whether it's stable enough to support them safely.

Dos Santos emphasizes the method's broader applicability. "What we've found is very applicable in different regions – in Antarctica, in Greenland, in Russia," he explained. The approach would be replicable using similar radar images and readily available seismic sensors.

Zhu's team plans to explore twenty years of prior seismic readings and ice movements in the Arctic to see how their integrated assessment approach holds up against historical data. It's an effort that could transform how we monitor one of Earth's most rapidly changing environments.

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Sometimes the most important scientific breakthroughs come from learning to listen – even when what you're hearing is the eerie sound of ice grinding against ice in one of the planet's most remote corners.