In the past two decades, the Argo Program has collected, processed, and distributed over two million vertical profiles of temperature and salinity from the upper two kilometers of the global ocean. A similar number of subsurface velocity observations near 1,000 dbar have also been collected. This paper recounts the history of the global Argo Program, from its aspiration arising out of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, to the development and implementation of its instrumentation and telecommunication systems, and the various technical problems encountered. We describe the Argo data system and its quality control procedures, and the gradual changes in the vertical resolution and spatial coverage of Argo data from 1999 to 2019. The accuracies of the float data have been assessed by comparison with high-quality shipboard measurements, and are concluded to be 0.002 • C for temperature, 2.4 dbar for pressure, and 0.01 PSS-78 for salinity, after delayed-mode adjustments. Finally, the challenges faced by the vision of an expanding Argo Program beyond 2020 are discussed.

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International audienceTwo recent destructive earthquakes in 1994 and 2004 near Al Hoceima highlight that the northern Moroccan margin is one of the most seismically active regions of the Western Mediterranean area. Despite onshore geodetic, seismological and tectonic field studies, the onshore-offshore location and extent of the main active faults remain poorly constrained. Offshore Al Hoceima, high-resolution seismic reflection and swath-bathymetry have been recently acquired during the Marlboro-2 cruise. These data at shallow water depth, close to the coast, allow us to describe the location, continuity and geometry of three active faults bounding the offshore Nekor basin. The well-expressed normal-left-lateral onshore Trougout fault can be followed offshore during several kilometers with a N171 degrees E +/- 3 degrees trend. Westward, the Bousekkour-Aghbal normal-left-lateral onshore fault is expressed offshore with a N020 degrees E +/- 4 degrees trending fault The N030 degrees E +/- 2 degrees Bokkoya fault corresponds to the western boundary of the Plio-Quaternary offshore Nekor basin in the Al Hoceima bay and seems to define an en echelon tectonic pattern with the Bousekkour-Aghbal fault. We propose that these three faults are part of the complex transtensional system between the Nekor fault and the Al-Idrissi fault zone. Our characterization of the offshore expression of active faulting in the Al Hoceima region is consistent with the geometry and nature of the active fault planes deduced from onshore geomorphological and morphotectonic analyses, as well as seismological, geodetic and geodynamic data