After the initial establishment of the Working Group (WG), membership to the WG will remain open to the international scientific community while the WG is active. New members interested in the WG theme will be expected to promote and contribute intellectually to the activities of the WG, and with ideas/suggestions that help carry on the mandate of the WG.
The InterRidge Office is pleased to announce new Working Groups:
Ocean Detachment Faults: Co-Chairs - J.Pablo Canales and Javier Escartin
Arc-Backarc Systems: Chair - Maria Seton
Seafloor Mineralisation - 3 year extension: Chair - Maurice Tivey
SMART - South Mid-Atlantic Ridge targeted Exploration: Chair: Colin Devey
Drivers of the Episodic life-cycle of Intra-oceanic Arc-Backarc Hydrothermal Systems
Convergent margins, where oceanic lithosphere is subducted into the mantle, form the key interface for large–scale chemical and thermal recycling amongst the ocean, crust, mantle, and atmosphere. Intra-oceanic convergent margins typically produce a forearc-island arc-backarc sequence within an extensional stress regime and contain a disproportionate number of hydrothermal vents per unit area.
A burgeoning interest in seafloor mineralization from many different viewpoints ranging from scientific research and conservation groups to commercial and national organizations was the original impetus for InterRidge forming a Seafloor Mineralization Working Group (SMWG) in 2008. While fundamental scientific research issues are at the core of the working group’s mission, it was also a vehicle to allow the scientific community to bring a unified voice to issues facing the discovery and use of metal-rich seafloor mineral resources.
The WG has welcomed a new associated member, Dr Sylvia Sander, from Marine and Freshwater Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, University of Otago, New Zealand. She is a specialist in trace metal speciation in natural aquatic systems and has published several papers on the complexation of metals issued from vents by organic ligands (Sander and Koschinsky, 2011). Beyond providing a very important and complementary scientific expertise, she will add to the international representation of the WG.
The Seafloor Mineralization Working Group added a new member Dr. Sven Petersen from IFM-GEOMAR, Germany to its membership. Several Working Group members attended the 40th Underwater Mining Institute in Hilo, Hawaii, Sept 14-16th. It was the largest attendance of any UMI meeting in its recent history.
This year again, the Vent Ecology WG has mainly been interacting at distance, through the internet as no major vent-biology meeting that would have allowed our gathering has taken place. Activities mainly focused on the establishment of a Sample Transfer Agreement form to facilitate sample use and exchange, as well as the developing interest of mining companies for hydrothermal polymetallic sulfide deposits.
One of the tenets of our working group was to encourage sample sharing, not only among researchers of hydrothermal vent biology, but also with other researchers. The acquisition of samples is costly (in terms of money, ship-time, personal time), and the sharing of the samples could both limit our impact on the vent communities, and increase citations for a given grant. Long-established collaborations rely on simple agreements. However, new collaborations may require more formal agreements.
The final report of the 2010 Workshop of the Long Range Exploration WG can be read here.
Two highly topical and relevant reports have recently been published:
The Dinard Report (Environmental Management of Deep-Sea Chemosynthetic Ecosystems: Justification of and Considerations for a Spatially-Based Approach)
"Illuminating Earth's Past, Present and Future" - IODP's science plan for the next decade of ocean drilling.
The above meeting will be held on 4-6 October 2011 at AORI, Tokyo, Japan, with an optional field trip on 2 October. Registration is now open and attendees are encouraged to post their interest as soon as possible. All details are available from the Japanese website.
In this meeting, there will be a focus on three objectives of crustal and mantle imaging, with an emphasis on mantle dynamics:
Workshop Report - posted Nov 2011
Background and Objectives
What have and can we derive from crustal and mantle imaging beneath the ocean together with laboratory and numerical studies?
Deep Earth Sampling Report for 2010
Chair – Benoit Ildefonse (CNRS, Univ. Montpellier 2, France)
Mantle Imaging WG
Chair – Nobukazu Seama (Kobe University, Japan)
In 2010, we convened a session at the EGU meeting, the title being: "Melt generation to crustal formation beneath mid-ocean ridges" and we had 12 abstracts. However, we merged to make an oral session entitled: "Two-phase dynamics of mid-ocean ridges and other systems: theory and observation". Whilst there were not many abstracts, the session itself attracted a lot of interest.
Click here if you would like to join InterRidge.
