Oceans are the engine of the Earth's ecosystem; they regulate the exchange and storage of carbon dioxide, control the climate and absorb most of the heat excess from greenhouse gas emissions. Temperature, acidity, and stratification of the oceans affect the distribution of marine species and the functioning of marine ecosystems. The impacts of anthropogenic pollution and eutrophication, coastal development and intensified agriculture, overexploitation of marine resources, and invasive species in the marine environments show no decreasing trend. In addition, 70% of the Earth's volcanism occurs on the ocean floor, which together with large earthquakes and submarine landslides are the main sources of earthquakes and tsunamis with consequent socio-economic impact. There is increasing interest to explore and understand all these aspects of the oceans, for instance UN launched the 2021-2030 Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. These programs can give answers to all these challenges.

Many global scientific and technological infrastructure programs monitor and study for a better understanding the Ocean's complex interrelated processes. The unique role of the research infrastructures underlies with their capability to collect long-term time series and spatial data from the surface, along the water column, down to the deep seafloor. They explore the Ocean with Eulerian and Lagrangian approaches calling for a comprehensive and integrated strategy. They represent a fundamental and irreplaceable contribution to the advancement in the oceanic processes' knowledge to highlight the effects of the multidisciplinary variety of processes on life and human beings' wellness. The aims of these programs are perfectly aligned with the key priorities of the UN Agenda 2030, Horizon Europe (2021-2027) and strongly contribute to the strategic areas of other initiatives, such as the EU JPI-Oceans.

This Research Topic intends to highlight the benefits of having a complete integrated and interdisciplinary approach. To tackle this, all the main worldwide actors will be involved, asking contributions as review papers and the scientific and technological results reached using the new tools are both welcome. We solicit contributions on: International and European strategy, updates to ongoing global scientific and technological infrastructure programs, scientific and technology results, relevant discoveries, current and future prospects.

The specific themes to address include:
· International and European strategy
· Worldwide recent and ongoing infrastructure programs
· Relevant scientific and technology results
· Best practices, data quality control and data FAIRness
· Conclusions with the present and future perspectives.

We welcome research papers to this Research Topic.

Submit your idea

Impact

Frontiers in Marine Science

Participating Journals

Impact