Data collected from 1996 to 2001 down to 3,500 m in the Tyrrhenian sub‐basin with ship‐handled and moored instruments show 5‐year T and S trends (0.016 °C/yr, 0.008/yr) that are the largest ever evidenced in Mediterranean deep waters. This is not consistent with the usual hypothesis that Tyrrhenian Deep Water (TDW) is a mixture of eastern water flowing from the Sicily Channel and western water flowing from the Sardinia Channel partly since both are reported to encounter lower trends. We argue that TDW might result from a dense water formation process occurring within the Tyrrhenian itself, in a region never reported up to now, east of the Bonifacio Strait. Whatever the validity of our hypothesis, climatic changes are occurring in the whole sea and are efficiently specified with long time series.

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The Institute for Geophysics (IfG) at Hamburg University and the Research Center for Marine Geoscience (GEOMAR) of Kiel University have developed new, wideband ocean bottom seismic stations (OBS) for long‐term, deep‐sea deployments of up to 1 year. A first long‐term pilot experiment of these stations was conducted in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily, in‐cooperation with the first long‐term, deep‐sea test of the European Ocean Bottom Observatory GEOSTAR [Beranzoli et al., 2000] by Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV). The seismic data retrieved prove that the new OBSs are useful for seismological studies. A large number of tele‐seismic earthquakes have been recorded in good quality; waves originating from such events pass the mantle and crust below the network, and thus provide important constraints on their structure.

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