Javier,
Thank you very much for your thoughtful comments. As I note in the final section of the report, the committee is faced with a decision about what directions to take with future work. I agree that a wider consultation should be undertaken before any decision is made. Some meeting participants felt that there were enough codes of conduct out there and that we'd wasting our time producing yet another, while others suggested that we should at least undertake a gap analysis to determine the need for a SMS focused code. Personally, I favour the latter but this will require a considerable amount of work. However, in the end, a carefully developed SMS-specific code would be less likely to be ignored by industry who already have their own general IMMS code.
What was clear from the discussions is that we cannot just naively begin writing yet another code based solely on our knowledge of the environment and the IMMS code. The suggestion to accelerate knowledge transfer to industry from basic research by providing information on exploration techniques actually came from an IR scientist. While I'm not terribly excited about the notion myself, we do need to acknowledge that economic geology has been an important driver for mid-ocean ridge research for several decades. That said, we cannot assume that the rest of the IR research community, with the exception of those involved in bioprospecting, is equally interested in the resource potential of seafloor spreading centres. I like your suggestion of engaging the broader community in this discussion.
Kim Juniper
