  We discuss the observability of neutrino-induced sphaleron transitions in the
IceCube detector, encouraged by a recent paper by Tye and Wong (TW), which
argued on the basis of a Bloch wave function in the periodic sphaleron
potential that such transitions should be enhanced compared to most previous
calculations. We calculate the dependence on neutrino energy of the sphaleron
transition rate, comparing it to that for conventional neutrino interactions,
and we discuss the observability of tau and multi-muon production in
sphaleron-induced transitions. We use IceCube 4-year data to constrain the
sphaleron rate, finding that it is comparable to the upper limit inferred
previously from a recast of an ATLAS search for microscopic black holes at the
LHC with $\sim 3$/fb of collisions at 13 TeV. The IceCube constraint is
stronger for a sphaleron barrier height $E_{\rm Sph} \gtrsim 9$ TeV, and would
be comparable with the prospective LHC sensitivity with 300/fb of data at 14
TeV if $E_{\rm Sph} \sim 11$ TeV.
