Access opportunities to a unique long term deep sea infrastructure

EMSO ERIC is a unique European distributed marine Research Infrastructure dedicated to the observation and study of the deep ocean in the long term in fixed regional areas. It provides different services of which access to its infrastructure by external users -engineers, scientists and researchers-, working both in the public and private sectors. The aim of this service, called physical access, is to facilitate access to instrumented platforms deployed at different sites across the European seas, from the seabed to the surface, in order to perform experiments in geosciences and engineering in real ocean conditions. Depending on the logistics and availability of each site, users may deploy their own platforms, instruments, systems or technologies to be tested by the existing equipment that, in this case, can provide reference measurements. Users may also deploy their own systems on the existing EMSO platforms, either in standalone mode or connected to them, receiving power and, in some cases, being able to transmit data by satellite or by cable, depending on the site. Projects requiring the use of several EMSO sites are also accepted. The host EMSO Regional Facility provides logistics and technical support in order to deploy and recover the systems, access the data and it may also offer training and co-development. EMSO ERIC launches the physical access call on a yearly basis and evaluates the received project proposals every two months. Access is free of charge and funding is available for travel, consumables, shipping, operations and hardware adaptations needed to run the project. Since 2022, when the first call was launched, ten projects with varied topics have been funded and are in different phases of execution.