Underwater laboratories for astroparticle physics and deep-sea science

The exploration of deep sea environments is presently at the dawn of a new era: underwater laboratories, permanently installed on the sea floor and offering power and on-line data transmission links to the shore, will allow to continuously monitor oceanographical properties. An important boost in this direction has been provided by the high energy physics scientific community, that aims at the realization of an underwater detector for cosmic high energy neutrinos. Neutrinos are considered a very promising probe for high energy astrophysics and many indications suggest that some of the most energetic sources known in the universe could also be high energy neutrino sources. The expected neutrino fluxes indicate that a km3-scale detector must be realised to achieve this ambitious aim. The quest for the realization of such a detector in the Mediterranean Sea has already started