Glaciology is driven by two fundamental goals: to understand how ice sheets will evolve in a warming climate and contribute to future sea-level rise, and to understand how ice sheets behaved in the past, providing insight into Earth’s possible climate states. Both goals require observing how ice flows and deforms—ideally from within the ice itself—yet doing so has long been limited by the difficulty of deploying and coupling borehole geophysical instruments in glacial environments. In this talk, I present borehole fiber-optic sensing experiments from two glaciers at opposite ends of the cryosphere: Store Glacier, a fast-flowing outlet glacier of the Greenland Ice Sheet central to projections of sea-level rise, and the Allan Hills of East Antarctica, home to the oldest (and perhaps most unusually preserved) ice on Earth and a critical archive of past climates spanning the Mid-Pleistocene Transition and late Miocene. At Store Glacier, fiber sensing captures signals of active deformation and basal processes in a dynamically evolving system. In contrast, measurements from the thin, cold ice of the Allan Hills reveal mechanical behavior in an ancient, low-strain environment where conventional borehole seismology is especially problematic. Together, these case studies demonstrate how fiber-optic sensing provides a powerful new window into glacier mechanics across both future-facing and past-facing glaciological problems.

Speaker-suggested reading:     

Miocene and Pliocene ice and air from the Allan Hills blue ice area, East Antarctica, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (44) e2502681122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2502681122 (2025).