The European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory is the European Research Infrastructure Consortium that specialises in monitoring and reporting the state of the ocean. That ocean that covers about 70% of the planet's surface, is essential for life on Earth, in regulating the climate and supplying food, but about which we know very little.

EMSO ERIC, as it's usually referred to, is a network of 14 different multi-sensor platforms -some in deep sea water, others in shallow water sites, some cabled and others free-standing - that keep an eye on marine ecosystems, monitoring ocean acidification, marine resources exploitation and water quality, and distilling enormous amounts of data into Essential Ocean Variables, EOVs, that are crucial measures in delivering ocean forecasts, early warnings, climate projections and assessments of the ocean's health to industry, to policy-makers and to a broad range of stakeholders.

Gabriella Quaranta, the EMSO ERIC Project Management Officer, talks in this 'A Window on Science' podcast about the importance of making this data FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable - and EMSO's close cooperation with other European Research Infrastructures, especially within the Environmental Research Infrastructures network (ENVRI), and EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud. This multidisciplinary approach provides a “whole earth approach”, combining information to understand the complex interaction between the hydrosphere, biosphere, geosphere and atmosphere, so as to give advance warning of geohazards, algal blooms, ocean warming, oil spills, and helping to mitigate climate change. In this way, EMSO ERIC contributes actively to the European Blue Growth Strategy and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.