The Methane Hydrates Interagency R&D Conference, held March 20-22, 2002, in Washington, D.C. was a collaborative effort of five federal agencies to present the results of, and future plans for, methane hydrate research. Topics presented included assessment of the scale at which hydrates occur; discussion on the connections among hydrates, global climate change, the world's oceans, and newly discovered chemosynthetic life forms; and discussion of the potential production of methane from hydrates. Participating federal agencies were: -Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) and National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) through the Strategic Center for Natural Gas (SCNG,2292 ); - Department of Commerce (DOE) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA,2292 ); -Department of Defense (DoD) Naval Research Laboratory (NRL,2292 ); - Department of Interior (DOI) Minerals Management Service (MMS) -Department of Interior (DOI) U.S. Geological Survey (USGS,2292 ); and - National Science Foundation (NSF).