Scientists Say They Can "Listen" for Water Ice Buried Under the Moon

Astronauts heading back to the Moon under NASA's Artemis program will need water they cannot afford to haul from Earth. A new study suggests the Moon itself may be able to say where that water is hiding, if scientists know how to listen.

2 to 3 times faster
That is how much quicker seismic waves travel through ice-bearing lunar soil compared with dry soil in the team's experiments, a difference large enough to show up clearly in field data.

Why does this matter?

Orbiting spacecraft have already spotted signs of ice near the Moon's poles, but they can only see the top layer of soil. Nobody knows how much ice sits deeper down, or exactly where it is concentrated. That question matters because water can be split into drinking water, breathable oxygen, and rocket fuel, resources that would be extremely expensive to bring from Earth. A reliable way to prospect underground, rather than guess from orbit, could shape where Artemis crews and robotic landers actually go.

What did the researchers find?

A team from the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Hawaii combined three lines of evidence. One researcher built a specialized cryogenic vacuum chamber, nicknamed FROST, that reproduces the Moon's subzero, airless conditions and uses X-ray imaging to watch how ice forms between grains of simulated lunar soil. A second scientist modeled which polar craters stay cold enough to keep ice stable over billions of years. A third ran simulations of how seismic waves, the same kind of vibrations that register on Earth during earthquakes, would move through that icy ground.

Combined, the models predicted that ice-rich regolith transmits seismic waves two to three times faster than dry regolith, and that ice-heavy layers can bounce some of that seismic energy back, producing a distinct echo. The team says a well-placed seismometer could use both effects not just to detect ice, but to estimate roughly how much is there, down to about 800 meters below the surface. The findings were published in the journal Science Advances.

How would this actually work on the Moon?

The method piggybacks on tools space agencies already plan to send. China's Chang'e-7 mission, expected to land near Shackleton Crater in late 2026, carries a seismometer in one of the most promising ice-hunting regions. NASA's Artemis program is separately expected to deploy the Lunar Environmental Monitoring Station, a seismic instrument designed for exactly this kind of survey. Neither mission was built specifically to test this model, but both could supply the first real seismic data to check it against.

What happens next?

The researchers describe their work as a testable prediction rather than a finished tool. They are hoping to compare it directly against data from NASA's VIPER rover, whose drill and onboard sensors could generate real seismic signals near the south pole, and eventually against Chang'e-7's own instruments once that mission lands. If the predicted signatures show up in that real-world data, it would mark the first direct confirmation that seismology, a technique long used to search for water and minerals underground on Earth, can do the same job hundreds of millions of kilometers away.

For now, the Moon has not given up its water yet, but scientists say they finally know what to listen for.