Splice type surface singularities were introduced by Neumann and Wahl as a generalization of the class of Pham-Brieskorn-Hamm complete intersections of dimension two. Their construction depends on a weighted graph with no loopscalled a splice diagram. In this talk, I will report on joint work with Patrick Popescu-Pampu and Dmitry Stepanov (arXiv: 2108.05912) that sheds new light on these singularities via tropical methods, reproving some of Neumann and Wahl'searlier results on these singularities, and showings that splice type surface singularities are Newton non-degenerate in the sense of Khovanskii.[-]