national support for the facilities needed to visit and sample 

 active vents as well as for initial scientific labors which 

 perforce follow utilization of these facilities. As the papers 

 engendered by the Global Vent Processes Symposium session 

 illustrate, OUR is providing a leadership role in the development 

 and support of not only critical facilities such as submersibles 

 and ROVs but of state-of-the-art instrumentation which will 

 eventually be used to equip remote, unmanned seafloor 

 laboratories. Such efforts are clearly called for in the not- 

 too-distant future in order to make the kinds of long-term 

 measurements necessary to model and then predict the global 

 consequences of seafloor venting. 



