The European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory (EMSO-ERIC, https://emso.eu/) is a research infrastructure distributed throughout Europe for seabed and water column observatories.  It aims to further explore the oceans, better understand the phenomena that occur on the seabed, and elucidate the critical role that these phenomena play in global Earth systems.  This observatory is based on observation sites (or nodes) that have been deployed in strategic locations in European seas, from the Arctic to the Atlantic, from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea.  There are currently eleven deepwater nodes plus four shallow water test nodes. 

EMSO-Western Ligurian Sea Node (https://www.emso-fr.org/fr) is a second generation permanent submarine observatory deployed offshore of Toulon, France, as a follow up of the pioneering ANTARES neutrino telescope. This submarine network, deployed at a depth of 2450m, is part of KM3NeT (https://www.km3net.org/) which has a modular topology designed to connect up to 120 neutrino detection units, i.e. ten times more than ANTARES. The Earth and Sea Science (ESS) instrumentation connected to KM3NeT is based on two complementary components: an Instrumented Interface Module (MII) and an autonomous mooring line (ALBATROSS).

The ALBATROSS line is an inductive instrumented mooring line (2000 m) composed of an acoustic communication system, two inductive cables equipped with CTD-O2 sensors, current meters and two instrumented buoys. The MII and the ALMBATROSS mooring line communicate through an acoustic link. The MII is connected to an electro-optical cable via the KM3NeT node allowing the data transfer from and to the land based controlled room.