Author name: Gordon E. Brown Jr.

Synchrotron X-ray sources and pulsed neutron sources are getting brighter. This permits new opportunities for scattering, spectroscopy, and imaging studies of Earth materials and processes that were not possible a decade ago. The impact of these latest-generation facilities on Earth sciences research requiring nanometer- to micrometer-scale resolution is growing and will continue to grow as next-generation X-ray and neutron sources become available over the next six years. These facilities will include the world’s first X-ray free-electron lasers in the US (2009) and Europe (2012) and the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA (2006). In addition, five nanoscale science research centers are under con- struction in the US and will impact the emerging field of nanogeoscience.

National scientific user facilities are becoming increasingly available to many different scientific communities in a number of countries. There is a growing use of these facilities by Earth and environmental scien- tists to study a broad range of materials and processes under realistic P–T and environmental conditions at unprecedented levels of energy and spatial resolution and elemental and isotopic sensitivity. The results of these studies are providing new insights into biogeochemical processes operating at Earth’s surface as well as petrological, geochemical, and geophysical processes in Earth’s interior. The availability of national user facilities is changing scien- tific approaches and is leading to multidisciplinary studies that were not possible a decade ago.

National and international communities of scientists from a variety of disciplines have been successful in convincing a growing number of countries to construct major user facilities that collectively serve these communities. These user facilities make possible experimental studies that cannot be done in individual investigator laboratories. In addition, they have created a new style of research, in which scientists working in shared facilities conduct studies that benefit from a merging of ideas and techniques from different disciplines. Earth science users of these facilities are growing in number and are benefiting greatly from the multidisciplinary interactions such facilities stimulate and from the unique experimental capabilities they provide.