The European Commission today announced the establishment of the European Research Consortium EMSO - European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory European Research Infrastructure Consortium (EMSO-ERIC http://ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures/index_en.cfm?pg=eric). The eight founding countries of the consortium (France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, United Kingdom, Spain) with headquarters in Rome represent a coordination program in marine scientific research at the forefront of the world. EMSO (http://www.emso-eu.org) is a European continent-wide research infrastructure in the field of environmental sciences. It is composed of deep-sea submarine observatories whose goal is to provide large data flows in order to address the complexities of climate change, the defense of marine ecosystems and the mitigation of natural risks. EMSO has 11 deep ocean marine observatories and 4 shallow water test sites for long-term monitoring, even in real time, of environmental processes affecting the geosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere and their interactions. The sites are located in European waters from the Arctic to the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, thus forming a large-scale European infrastructure serving the international scientific community. EMSO offers the possibility of carrying out continuous and high-resolution scientific observations with a large variety of measuring instruments and is able to supply power to external experiments and data. The infrastructure supports a truly multi- and interdisciplinary spectrum of disciplines and includes biology, geology, bio-geo-chemistry, earth physics, marine engineering and computer sciences from the Arctic to the subtropics. The eight countries participating in the consortium that manages this infrastructure (Italy, headquarters of the consortium, France, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, United Kingdom) thus intend to actively promote European scientific research in the marine environment, under the aegis of European Commission.
The European Commission announced today the legal formation of the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory European Research Infrastructure Consortium (EMSO-ERIC). The eight founding countries (France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, UK; head office in Rome) of the consortium lead the world in this level of ocean observing coordination. EMSO is a technologically advanced pan-European Research Infrastructure of fixed seafloor and water-column observatories (currently 11 deep and 4 shallow nodes around Europe). It provides power, communications, sensors, and data infrastructure for continuous, high resolution, real-time, interactive ocean observations and supports a truly multi-and inter-disciplinary range of research areas including biology, geology, chemistry, physics, engineering, and computer science, from polar to tropical environments, down to the abyss.