News | Department of Earth and Space Sciences

Aug 13, 2025 | Publications, In the News

'Revolutionary' seafloor fiber sensing reveals how falling ice drives glacial retreat in Greenland

A UW-led team of researchers, including ESS postdoc Dominik Gräff and Assistant Professor Brad Lipovsky, used a fiber-optic cable to capture calving dynamics across the fjord of the Eqalorutsit Kangilliit Sermiat glacier in South Greenland. This allowed them to document — without getting too close — one of the key processes that is accelerating the rate of glacial mass loss and in turn, threatening the stability of ice sheets, with consequences for global ocean currents and local ecosystems.

Read the full story on UW News

Jul 28, 2025 | Publications, In the News

Seismologists tapped into the fiber optic cable network to study offshore faults

UW ESS researchers showed that they can monitor seismic activity at the ocean floor using fiber optic cables without disrupting telecommunications. They developed this technique in Alaska and then tested it off the coast of Oregon.

Using a fiber optic cable and machine learning to track glacial melt

Understanding how glaciers melt is key to understanding environmental change, water security, and sea level rise. A new study, led by ESS graduate student John-Morgan Manos, uses Distributed Acoustic Sensing to train a machine learning model to predict glacier runoff.

Rocky planets orbiting small stars could have stable atmospheres needed to support life

A UW-led study recently published in Nature Communications finds that certain rocky planets orbiting a small star 40 light years away may have stable atmospheres needed to support life. Lead author and ESS assistant professor Joshua Krissansen-Totton is quoted.

Life could exist on Mars in shallow meltwater pools below icy surface, study suggests

A new study from researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, UW, and other universities suggests microbes could find a potential home beneath layers of ice known to exist on Mars' surface. Lead author Aditya Khuller will join the UW Applied Physics Laboratory as a senior research scientist in November. ESS professor emeritus and co-author Steve Warren is quoted.

Explaining dramatic planetwide changes after world's last 'Snowball Earth' event

Some of the most dramatic climatic events in our planet’s history are “Snowball Earth” events that happened hundreds of millions of years ago, when almost the entire planet was encased in ice up to 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) thick. ESS PhD student Trent Thomas is lead author on a new study recently published in Nature Communications.