Europe has a long history of destructive earthquakes with Balkan and Meditteranean countries being at higher risk of earthquakes than other areas in Europe. Indeed, in recent times both Turkey and Italy have been affected. In 1999 Izmit in Turkey was hit by an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale. The area was devastated and 17,000 people killed. In 2009, over 300 people lost their lives in L’Aquila in Italy to a 5.9 magnitude earthquake.
Understanding and analysing seismic faults and their activities can be critical for locating buildings, tanks, and pipelines and assessing the seismic shaking and tsunami hazard to infrastructure and people in the vicinity. Near-Fault Observatories (NFOs) are advanced multidisciplinary research infrastructures based on integrated networks of multi-parametric sensors continuously monitoring the chemical and physical processes governing active faults and the genesis of earthquakes.
Presently, thousands of public and privately owned permanent GNSS stations are operating in Europe. The EPOS Preparatory Phase has demonstrated that national networks want to provide and distribute GNSS data through common European services which, when implemented, will be used by European researchers in solid Earth science as well as in other environmental sciences.
In 2010, small volcanic eruptions at Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland, disrupted air travel worldwide, at an estimated cost of €1300 million. Understanding the circumstances that made this eruption so costly involves not only researchers across diverse disciplines, but also civil authorities, aviation authorities, industry, and public all around Europe.
Satellite Data is used in all Earth Observation domains and applications. EPOS will implement a set of mature services that have already had a positive impact in the investigation of physical processes controlling earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, unrest episodes as well as tectonics and Earth surface dynamics.
The monitoring of Geomagnetic fields has a long history across Europe, though there has been little European-level coordination. EPOS will consolidate the community; modernise data archival and distribution formats for existing services, such as INTERMAGNET; and create new services for magnetotelluric data and geomagnetic models.
EPOS will integrate distributed research infrastructures (RI) to facilitate and stimulate research on anthropogenic hazards (AH) especially those associated with the exploration and exploitation of geo-resources.
Processing and the use of simulation and visualisation tools will subsequently support the integrated analysis and characterisation of complex subsurface structures and their inherent dynamic processes.
This will provide future virtual research environments with means to facilitate the use of existing information for future applications.
EPOS includes a wide range of world-class laboratory infrastructures ranging from high temperature and pressure experimental facilities, to electron microscopy, micro-beam analysis, analogue modeling and paleomagnetic laboratories. Most data produced by the various laboratory centres and networks are presently available only in limited “final form” in publications.
For 2020, the EU has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1990 levels and further cuts are being decided for 2050. This commitment is one of the headline targets of the Europe 2020 growth strategy and is being implemented through binding legislation.