Kent Anderson leads the work on the cable trench for the South Pole Remote Earth Science and Seismological Observatory (SPRESSO. The seismic
station at the South Pole is a key site in the GSN, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation through the Incorporated Research Institution for Seismology (IRIS), and operated in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) through the Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory. This GSN station also serves as a United States contribution
to the International Monitoring System for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The South Pole is one of the quietest places on the planet, except for wind and human activity at the Amundsen-Scott station.
To achieve the true scientific potential for seismology, the seismic instrumentation is installed in the Quiet Sector away from human noise, and deployed in boreholes 300m (1,000 ft) deep in the ice to get away from the wind noise near the surface.