We are grateful to the crew, technicians, and scientific staff of Leg 193. The electron microprobe analyses were performed at two different laboratories: IGM (Instituto Geológico Mineiro, Porto, Portugal) and Department of Geology, University of Toronto, Canada. We thank Dr. Farinha Ramos and Mr. Paulo Bravo from IGM for the assistance and support they gave during EPMA work at the IGM laboratory and Dr. Claudio Cermignani for support and for development of the routines at University of Toronto that permitted the high quality level of the achieved analyses. XRD analyses were performed at University of Lisbon and at University of Toronto. We would like to acknowledge the support given by Ms. Patrícia Conceição and Mr. Carlos Carvalho at Creminer (University of Lisbon) and Mr. George Kretschmann (University of Toronto). A special mention goes to Carlos Carvalho for the support he gave in the scan interpretation and for the use of his still unpublished software Identify (version 2.0). Robert Zierenberg and the editor Lorri Peters promptly and constructively reviewed the original manuscript. The authors also wish to thank Jay Miller for his suggestions and help in improving the manuscript. This research used data and/or samples supplied by the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP). ODP is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and participating countries under management of Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI), Inc. Funding for this research was provided by ICCTI-GRICES and the Seahma project (FCT-Portugal).