The challenges inherent to collecting high-quality geophysical data
in Antarctica are mainly related to access, siting, power,
temperature, and data storage.  

Single-station data have severe limits to their utility, though these
data are still necessary for archival, long-term analyses, and
base-station purposes.  The next frontier in Antarctic geophysical
data collection and analysis lies in relatively dense regional
networks and extremely dense local networks or transects. The
installation, data-collection, and maintenance of such networks is
likely to be the single most severe challenge to AntarcticArray.  The
limited time in which operations can be effectively conducted,
multiplied by the available resources (aircraft, fuel, personnel,
instrumentation) is the limiting factor in these experiments.  With
sufficient resources (concentrated into that short time period), it is
quite possible that this "limit" is one that is acceptable to the
science community.

The other parameters in the technical challenges are siting and
power.  As the access to high-quality uninterrupted power is limited
to a handful of stations in Antarctica, most of the proposed stations
will be off the grid and will have to be self supporting.  With
appropriate development efforts, it is conceivable that the
power-consumption and the remote-power-availability curves can be
made to cross each other, but there is significant work needed in
both those arenas.  The stations themselves will have to be sited on
the ice sheet, with the consequent (small) loss in data quality from
the low-density of the upper surface of much of the ice sheet.

Temperature is an important, but not insuperable barrier to successful
deployment of geophysical instrumentation.  There is need for
significant investment in upgrading/designing instruments capable of
withstanding these conditions.  Data access/data storage are related
to the access issue mentioned above.  If remote data access can be
developed, then the need to re-visit sites is significantly reduced.
Development of a satellite-based data collection (non-lossy) will have
significant impacts by reducing the need to revisit 100% of the
sites.  Rather, only those stations that are experiencing
difficulties can be re-visited for maintenance.

These issues have been encountered, and dealt with by various
different approaches, in the several seismic networks I have
installed in Antarctica.  I will report on these networks.