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from the office
April 2009, sponsored by the WHOI Morss Colloquium program.
For more details, please see the update from the working
group for Seafloor Mineralization and advertisement on p. 57.
Code of Conduct
We presented the IR Statement of Commitment to Responsible
Research Practices at Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents at the
AOGS 2008 meeting. This “Code of Conduct” has now been
endorsed by the ChEss program and adopted by the OSPAR
Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of
the North-East Atlantic. Individual IR members may log on
to their user profiles or use the following web address to check
a box in support of the statement: http://www.interridge.org/
node/add/signstatement.
Databases
Also as part of the Next Decade Plan, the IR office in the past
year has significantly revised the databases for ridge-crest cruises
and for hydrothermal vents.
Cruise Database. In January 2008 IR launched a revised online
database of international cruises to mid-ocean ridges and
back-arc basin spreading centers (http://www.interridge.org/
IRcruise). The >500 cruises in the database date back to 1982.
IR members are able to enter their cruises directly to the database
using an online form. IR also maintains an up-to-date list
of upcoming ridge-crest cruises. If you would like your cruise
to be featured on the IR website’s “News from the Ridge Crest”
page, please contact the IR office (coordinator@interridge.org).
Vents Database. The IR Coordinator is currently revising the
InterRidge Global Hydrothermal Vents Database and will announce
it to the community when the update is completed.
The Vents Database was requested by a wide range of parties in
this past year, including academic and government researchers,
NGOs, public museums, private industry and consultants, and
Google Earth.
Website
This year, we translated the IR website homepage into the languages
of all Principal Member Nations (Chinese, English,
French, German, and Japanese) plus Russian. We also hope to
translate the IR homepage to additional languages (e.g., Spanish,
Portuguese, Korean, Italian, etc.) and welcome volunteers
from the IR community on this effort. Our website is updated
daily; please feel free to contact the IR Coordinator with news,
event listings, and job advertisements for the community.
InterRidge Student and Postdoctoral Fellowship Program:
Announcement of partnership with ISA Endowment Fund for 2009 - 2011
We are very pleased to announce a new partnership with the
International Seabed Authority (ISA) Endowment Fund for
the InterRidge Student and Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
The ISA Endowment Fund is a new program for collaborative
marine scientific research, with details and brochure
available at: http://www.isa.org.jm/en/efund/. The mission of
the ISA Endowment Fund is to support the participation of
qualified scientists and technical personnel from developing
countries in marine research activities and to provide opportunities
for collaboration by these persons. The ISA Endowment
Fund will provide funding for two InterRidge Student
and Postdoctoral Fellowships each year for the next three
years (2009 - 2011). At $5000 US for each Fellowship, our
grant totals $30,000 US, and it reflects important progress in
our long-term goal of soliciting external grants to strengthen
InterRidge activities and promote international cooperation.
The InterRidge Next Decade Plan includes capacity building,
or strengthening contacts to the less industrialized or noncoastal
nations, heightening the appreciation that the world’s
oceans are relevant to the lives of all the peoples on Earth.
For our next generation of ridge-crest scientists, InterRidge
would like to enable individuals from developing countries
to participate in research cruises and to obtain training in
laboratory techniques for ridge-crest research.
We expect to offer a total of three Fellowships each year for
2009 - 2011 at the level of $5000 US for each Fellowship.
One of the Fellowships is solely funded by InterRidge, which
is open to a graduate student or postdoc from any nation. The
remaining two Fellowships are funded by the ISA Endowment
Fund, with the requirement that the graduate student
or postdoc is either from a developing country or will assist
in training those of a developing country. All Fellowships
will have the same application form, and all proposals will
undergo the same rigorous scientific review by InterRidge.
Ranking of the applications will be based on several factors
ranging from the quality and expected significance of the
science to the fellowship providing an opportunity that the
student is otherwise not likely to experience.
For more details on this announcement, please see: http://
www.interridge.org/node/5675. The call for proposals for
2009 Fellows will be released in January 2009 on the IR
website, and proposals will be due 31 March 2009.
InterRidge News 3 Vol. 17, 2008