Associated Sciences

The underwater world has not yet been extensively explored. Current technology allows autonomous vehicles or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to carry out scientific experiments at great depths only for relatively short periods and with accompanying support ships.

All over the world, different scientific communities have repeatedly stressed in the last two decades the importance to perform long-term real-time measurements in extreme environments like the deep sea.

Such measurements of oceanographic (current velocity and direction) and environmental (temperature, conductibility, salinity, pressure, natural optical noise from sea organisms) parameters will be possible using a network of sensors installed as a part of the neutrino telescope.

The installation of specialised instrumentation for seismology, gravimetry, radioactivity, geomagnetism, oceanography and geochemistry will make the KM3NeT infrastructure an abyssal multidisciplinary observatory for deep sea science that will offer a unique opportunity to explore the properties of a deep Mediterranean Sea site over a period of many years.

The KM3NeT facility will become part of the ESONET, the European Seafloor Observatory Network. The three possible sites for the KM3NeT facility: the Ligurian site (the ANTARES site near Toulon), the Sicilian site (the NEMO site) and the Hellenic Site (the NESTOR site near Pylos) each are attractive to become a node in the ESONET observatory network. Here you find a cartoon of an ESONET node-configuration. The ESONET project steering group is describe here.