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from the office
Coordinator Update
Stace Beaulieu
The InterRidge (IR) program office is now in its second year at
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and we are
now almost halfway into the InterRidge Next Decade Plan for
2004 - 2013 (http://www.interridge.org/science/nextdecade).
Membership
The first of the four main functions of InterRidge (http://
www.interridge.org/4mainfunctions) is to build and maintain
an interactive international ridge-research community. In the
past year, IR expanded from 28 to 30 regional and national
memberships with the addition of Chile and Chinese Taipei
as Corresponding Members. The ~2500 individual members
in IR now come from a total of 62 countries with this year’s
addition of members from Colombia, Malaysia, Nepal, and
Vietnam. The biweekly “interridge-mail” e-news is sent to over
1600 IR members, as well as being posted by the InterRidge-
Japan program to its e-mail subscribers. We also email job
postings (“interridge-classifieds”) to over 100 IR members. We
have been updating the IR membership list on a regular basis;
please email the IR office or log on to your member account if
you have changed your mail or email address.
Steering Committee
In October 2008, the IR Steering Committee meeting was held
at WHOI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA (photo below).
We welcome three new Steering Committee Members for
2009: Dan Fornari (USA, new Chair of Ridge 2000 Program),
Hidenori Kumagai (Japan), and Nadine Le Bris (France). For
our Members rotating off the Committee, we thank Fernando
Barriga (Portugal), Donna Blackman (USA), Françoise Gaill
(France), Rosario Lunar (Spain), and Nobukazu Seama (Japan)
for their years of leadership and service.
National Correspondents
We thank Steve Scott for serving
as National Correspondent
for Canada from 2004 - 2008,
and Ian Wright for New Zealand
from 1998 - 2008.
Working Groups
The second of the four main
functions of InterRidge is to
identify, through its working
groups and workshops, the
most compelling questions
in ridge research and develop
program plans to address these
questions. Our eight current
working groups cover a wide
IR Steering Committee in Woods Hole, MA, USA,
Oct. 2008: Front row (left to right): S. Beaulieu, J. Lin, J. Ishibashi;
Back row: S Park, C. Fisher, M. Tivey, J. Chen, J. Dyment, D. Blackman,
B. Ildefonse, S. Silantyev, S. Hourdez.
range of exciting research directions of major interest to the
international community. Please find an update for each of our
working groups starting on p. 44: Biogeochemical Interactions
at Deep-Sea Vents, Deep Earth Sampling, Long-Range Ridge
Exploration, Mantle Imaging, Monitoring and Observatories,
Seafloor Mineralization, Ultra-slow Spreading Ridges, and
Vent Ecology. At least two of our four new working groups
will have their first meetings in 2009: Seafloor Mineralization
(April 2009) and Vent Ecology (June 2009). We are also pleased
to announce the approval of a new SCOR working group, to
be co-funded by InterRidge, on "Hydrothermal energy transfer
and its impact on ocean carbon cycles." The proposal was
developed from discussions at the InterRidge Theoretical Institute
(IRTI) on Biogeochemical Interaction at Deep-Sea Vents,
held in September 2007. This is the first SCOR working group
in over ten years to derive from InterRidge activities.
Workshops
IR co-sponsored the Magellan Workshop on "Lithospheric
heterogeneities, hydrothermal regimes, and links between abiotic
and biotic processes at slow spreading ridges" in September
2008 in Montpellier, France (see article, p. 51). The Magellan
Workshop was relevant to several of our working groups,
including Biogeochemical Interactions at Deep-Sea Vents,
Deep Earth Sampling, and Ultra-slow Spreading Ridges. IR
also sponsored the Monitoring and Observatories working
group to participate in the USA Ridge 2000 Mid-Atlantic
Ridge Workshop in March 2008 in Portland, Oregon, USA.
IR scientists also co-organized and participated in the Qingdao
Ocean Sciences Summer School in July 2008 in Qingdao,
China (see article, p. 50) and a mid-ocean ridge special session
at the Asia Oceania Geosciences (AOGS) Conference in June
2008 in Busan, Korea (see article,
p. 52).
In line with the third of the
four main functions of Inter-
Ridge, to act as a representative
body for international ridge
scientists in policy discussions,
the IR office held a meeting in
January 2008 with the ChEss
(Chemosynthetic Ecosystems)
office of the Census of Marine
Life to discuss deep-sea mining
of seafloor massive sulfides.
This meeting led to a successful
proposal for a policy workshop
and public forum planned for
InterRidge News 2 Vol. 17, 2008