European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory

European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory (EMSO) is a large-scale European distributed Research Infrastructure (RI) for ocean observation, enabling real-time interactive long term monitoring of ocean processes. EMSO allows study of the interaction between the geosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, and the lithosphere; including natural hazards, climate change, and marine ecosystems. EMSO nodes have been deployed at key sites in European seas, starting from the Arctic, through the Atlantic and Mediterranean, to the Black Sea.

Overview

EMSO is one of the environmental RIs on the Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures(ESFRI). The ESRFI Roadmap identifies RIs of pan-European importance that correspond to the long term needs of European research communities.

The different EMSO nodes were designed to address topics of regional importance: the biodiversity of mid ocean hot vents in the Azores region, the rapidly changing environmental conditions affecting the geosphere and biosphere of the Arctic, the deep-water ventilation in the eastern Mediterranean, the active seismicity and the associated geo-hazards of the Anatolian region. EMSO infrastructure has the capacity to observe the deep and open ocean, below, at and above the seafloor, at the European scale, utilizing both stand-alone observing systems, and nodes connected to shore stations through high throughput fibre optic cable. The mission of EMSO is to unite these regional observatories into a common research infrastructure, to implement more generic sensor packages to collect synoptic data series on oceanographic features of more than regional interest, to bring these data together in a uniform format accessible to the general public, and to ensure maintenance of this research infrastructure over a longer time-span than easily maintained by national funding programs.

EMSO

EMSO may be: