Sea & Earth Sciences within ANTARES

ANTARES, as its acronym implies -Astronomy with a Neutrino Telescope and Abyss environmental RESearch-  is not only a Neutrino telescope but also a deep-sea cabled observatory for sea and earth sciences. This infrastructure represents an amazing potential of discovery for several disciplines in this field.

To understand deep-sea environment, scientists need to observe. Most oceanographic instruments on the seafloor are not connected with the surface: they have to run on batteries and store data locally. Scientists have access to their data after the recovery of the instrument.

Cabled observatories like ANTARES, or MARS (Monterey Bay, USA) or NEPTUNE Canada (West Coast of Vancouver, Canada), remove these restrictions in providing not only electrical power and real-time data acquisition but also the possibility for scientists to interact directly with their sensors. They can control and monitor them in reaction to the observation of peculiar events. New opportunities are also given to marine sciences and geosciences: listenning to mammals, bioluminescent organism observation, global change studies and its consequence on marine circulation and biodiversity.

Why we observe the Mediterranean Sea?

The oceans, more than continents, are the contributor to global climate regulation. The Mediterranean Sea is often considered as a “mini-ocean”, where time-scales of observed phenomenon are shortened. Observation and modelization of processes in the Mediterranean Sea help scientists to better understand the effect of climate change on the oceans and reciprocally.