This past January, the DESCEND-2 workshop was held in Cambridge, MA. The purpose of this workshop was to discuss the short and long-term directions of deep sea research, and to identify the technological, logistical and cultural advances and changes our community needs to support those research directions.
The DESCEND-2 steering committee identified and charged dicussion leaders with writing up summaries of each breakout group. Those summaries have now been completed and are posted online at https://descend2blog.wordpress.com.
Now, we are asking you to read those summaries and comment on them accordingly. You should feel free to read and comment on any summary that is of interest to you, whether or not you attended the workshop. These summaries will form the bulk of the report that will be sent to and read by our agency representatives. In fact, it is our goal to disseminate this document as broadly as possible so that we have the best chance of garnering the support we need to meet our research goals.
YOUR VOICE MATTERS. Please do take the time to weigh in on these documents. We will leave these open for comment for one month (until June 10, 2016). At that time, we will include your remarks to the best of our abilities. In some cases, we may have to paraphrase your statements. As such, we will reopen the documents for comment once we are done with the revisions, though the window of time for commenting on the revisions will be much shorter.
It is our goal to have this completed and circulated by the end of summer.
Thanks in advance for your continued efforts, and I look forward to hearing from you all
Regards,
Pete Girguis, on behalf of DeSSC and the DESCEND2 steering committee