The Scientific Party of Leg 209 is grateful to the many people and institutions that made the cruise a success.

The crew of the JOIDES Resolution, led by Captain Tom Hardy, Drilling Superintendent Wayne Malone, Senior Toolpusher Pepe Estevez, Core Technician Joe Attryde, Drillers Nick Parish and Phil Christie, and Dynamic Positioning (DP) Operators Dwight Mossman and Steve Cowan, provided exceptional support and excellent advice in a difficult hard rock drilling environment. Thanks to the expertise of Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Operations Manager Mike Storms in planning and implementation, we were able to complete one of the most successful hard rock legs in ODP history (1187 m of penetration and 466 m of core in 19 holes at 8 sites, with all holes started in bare rock or just a few meters of sediment, without guidebases, and with minimal loss of equipment). Mike was constantly helpful, flexible, and understanding of the trade-offs between ODP resources and scientific goals, and cheerful throughout the many marathon camera surveys in the DP shack. The ODP marine laboratory technicians, led by Laboratory Officer Roy Davis, provided excellent support for science operations. We are particularly grateful for the unprecedented number of thin sections prepared by Gus Gustafson and the preparation of an unprecedented number of hard rock samples by the entire technical staff in the last few days of the cruise, led by Curator Paula Weiss. We also appreciate the constantly cheerful and willing help of the ODP technical staff during this, the second to last leg of the Ocean Drilling Program.

Many scientists provided unpublished data without which Leg 209 would not have been possible. These include Henri Bougault, Peter Rona, Leonid Dmitriev, Sergei Silantiev, Mathilde Cannat, John Collins, Bob Detrick, members of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (WHOI/JAMSTEC) MODE 98 scientific party and their collaborators (especially Toshi Fujiwara, Mike Braun, and Jian Lin), and the scientific party of James Clark Ross Cruise JR63 (especially Chris MacLeod and Javier Escartin).

We greatly missed the company of shore-based scientists Barbara John and Günter Suhr, who were unable to join the scientific party, and we wish them the best of luck in their postcruise research.