Many fundamental issues in climatic, environmental, geological, and ecological studies require an in-depth knowledge of the rates and forms of exchange of chemical species, mass, and energy between the atmosphere and the earth’s surface.

Such exchanges are relevant over a large range of spatial and temporal scales, e.g., from the rapid turnover times, hours to days, of volatile organic carbon emissions within a forest canopy to incremental changes in global concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and their feedbacks to climate over tens of millions of years.

Knowledge of the mechanisms governing atmosphere-surface interactions is essential to our understanding of both modern and geologic record and will permit us to speculate about how perturbations to the earth system are potentially mitigated or amplified by feedbacks within that system.