The ongoing retreat of the summer sea-ice cover in the Arctic has sparked renewed interest in wave propagation through sea ice. As the seasonal ice zone expands to cover the whole Arctic basin, waves are increasingly implicated in the break-up and hence lateral melt of the ice. Such waves can be generated either locally – the larger open-water areas now giving an increased fetch for local winds to raise significant wave energy – or remotely, from distant storms in the Greenland-Icelandic-Norwegian seas and the North Atlantic. Modelling efforts to understand the flow of wave energy through sea ice are becoming increasingly realistic, dominantly in terms of the heterogeneity that they can treat, and field measurements to validate these models are required. We thus present data obtained using autonomous drifting tiltmeter buoys from both Arctic and Antarctic seas. These data represent unique long-term records of the wave field at penetrations varying from deep inside the pack to the ice edge. Antarctic measurements are presented from a single tiltmeter buoy which was deployed close to the Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf in March 2005 from the James Clark Ross. The buoy travelled north with the advancing pack ice over winter, eventually ceasing transmissions close to the Weddell Sea ice edge at 65° S in March 2006. Data from Baffin Bay are presented from a pair of tiltmeters which passed through Nares Strait in December 2005, following their deployment from an ice camp in the Lincoln Sea, north of Canada’s Ellesmere Island, in April 2004. They travelled south on the drifting pack ice, maintaining a separation of ~500 km. The southernmost buoy ceased transmissions in January 2006 at about 69° N, but the remaining buoy reached a latitude of 56° N, far to the south of the satellite-derived ice edge, before it too stopped transmitting, in July 2006. We examine the attenuation of the measured waves with reference to the open-ocean wave field from both the ECMWF WAM model and from the JASON satellite altimeter. For the Baffin Bay data, we calculate the attenuation and changes in wave spectra between the tiltmeter pair.