This award funds the RIDGE 2000 project office, which is the coordinating body for Ridge 2000 (R2K), an interdisciplinary research program focused on integrated studies of Earth's oceanic spreading centers - the 50,000 km mid-ocean ridge system, which is populated by hydrothermal vents that support diverse communities of living organisms and where oceanic crust is created. The Ridge 2000 program addresses a wide range of topics ranging from crustal accretion to the transfer of energy from the mantle to the hydrosphere, to biological systems supported by hydrothermal circulation. The office will coordinate the final synthesis and integration phase of the decade-long Ridge 2000 Program that has collected a wealth of information. Community interaction will be supported through a series of meetings each year and by teleconferences and web conferences. The R2K office will also enhance data management and web functions by establishing a consolidated web site at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), and continue to support the existing education and outreach activity at Pennsylvania State University.
The disciplinary and thematic breadth of the National Science Foundation’s Ridge 2000 (R2K) Program has been significant, and the scientific success of the program can be measured by the innovative technologies it has spawned and the nearly-thousand peer-reviewed scientific papers, meeting abstracts and other articles it has produced over the past decade. The Ridge Interdisciplinary Global Experiments (RIDGE) Initiative funded by the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Sciences Division in the early 1990s was the predecessor of R2K. It provided the first truly multidisciplinary focused program for the ocean sciences with an overarching objective to explore all facets of global MOR phenomena, and yielding a profound expansion of our knowledge of oceanic spreading center processes. During the Ridge 2000 Program, implementation and use of robotic and autonomous vehicles became routine and a wide range of new, specialized sensors and sampling devices were developed to capture various physical and biogeochemical characteristics of hydrothermal fluids. US R2K scientists have also been involved with the international program on MOR studies called ‘InterRidge’, and through R2K the US has been a formal contributing full-member of InterRidge and R2K Chairs have been members of the InterRidge Executive Committee (ExCom). InterRidge is an international program whose mission is to promote all aspects of mid-ocean ridge research (their study, use and protection) that can only be achieved through international cooperation (www.interridge.org/). Through the connection and compatible goals of the 2 programs, R2K and InterRidge have sponsored a number of important, successful, international, multidisciplinary meetings. InterRidge is also dedicated to reaching out to the public, scientists and government officials, and provides a unified voice for ocean ridge researchers worldwide. US scientists have helped to lead InterRidge over the past decade and have been involved in discussions involving exploration and process studies of the global ridge crest. The closing summary of the R2K Program can be found in the numerous articles published in the R2K Special Issue of Oceanography. The Ridge 2000 Program summary compendium was produced by a broad cross section of the Ridge 2000 community and published as a Special Issue in March 2012 (Vol. 25. #1) by The Oceanography Society (TOS). Many of the articles in the special issue were conceived of during detailed discussions in various working groups at the Ridge 2000 meeting in Portland, Oregon in 2010, and in follow-up efforts since. These research endeavors represent not an ‘end’ but rather a beginning of a vibrant next phase of global research on oceanic spreading centers that will continue to explore myriad links between causal processes in both spatial and temporal domains. The publication has received considerable mention throughout the US and international community and has been broadly disseminated in print copy and the online version of the Special Issue is available free from TOS at the following URL: www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/25-1.html
