Observations of waves-in-sea ice support advances in coupled modeling both by improving process understanding of attenuation mechanisms, as well as providing datasets for model comparison and validation. Both benefit from high-fidelity contextual information of sea ice conditions, while process understanding especially requires high-resolution spatial and temporal coverage to identify mechanisms and feedbacks. Conventional methods for measuring waves typically have trade-offs in these aspects. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) provides a novel opportunity to turn coastal seafloor telecommunication and other fiber optic cables into high-resolution surface wave measurements. Laser reflections off impurities in the fiber provide measurement of strain or strain-rate, which is responsive to variations in seafloor pressure (as well as acoustic and other waveforms in the water column). This allows each channel to act like a seafloor pressure mooring such that a fiber tens of kilometers in length with channel spacing of meters acts like a series of thousands of virtual wave buoys. Thus, it provides a particularly appealing method for observing spatial and temporal changes in seasonally ice-covered coastal environments with high spatial gradients. Results from interrogation of a telecommunication cable in the Alaskan Arctic have been used to obtain measurements of wave attenuation rates in new, partial sea ice cover. The rapid evolution of the location and strength of attenuation serves as proxy for the evolution of ice coverage and thickness, especially during rapidly evolving events. Such measurements provide notably higher spatial resolution of wave statistics than achievable by other in situ methods, with less logistical effort, providing new opportunities for process understanding and model development.