Findings and Recommendations - New Research Opportunities in the Earth Sciences - page 100

evaluating the success of the CZO program at regular intervals will ensure its long-
term success.
Finding 3: To advance our understanding of the cycling of water, carbon, nutrients,
and geological materials in terrestrial environments, it will be valuable to have
measurements at single points on the landscape integrated smoothly with more
broadly distributed estimates derived from remote sensing. All of these measurements
will have to be coordinated with new theory and models appropriate for landscape
and regional scales to resolve spatial and temporal trends caused by climate change,
land use, and other human impacts.
Finding 4: There is a major role for modern critical zone science as a bridge between
ancient analogs archived in the geological record and the anticipated consequence of
future changing climate, growing water demand, and greater and evolving land use.
Recommendation: EAR should continue to support programs and initiatives
focused on integrated studies of the cycling of water, carbon, nutrients, and
geological materials in the terrestrial environment, including mechanisms and
reactions of soil formation; hydrological and nutrient cycling; perturbations
related to human activities; and more generally the cycling of carbon between
surface environments and the atmosphere and its feedbacks with climate,
biogeochemical processes, and ecosystems.
Instrument and Facilities Needs for Biogeochemical and Water Cycles in
Terrestrial Environments and Impacts of Global Change
Finding 1: Advancing this research priority will require a substantial focus on in situ
environmental sensors, field instruments, geochemical and microbiological tools,
remote sensing, surface and subsurface imaging, and development of new
technologies. There is also a need for computational facilities and community
modeling efforts like the CSDMS and the Community Hydrologic Modeling Platform
(CHyMP).
FACILITIES FOR GEOCHRONOLOGY
A strong theme developed in many of the previous sections of this report is
the pressing need to enhance the community's capacity to produce high-quality dates.
The recent pace of innovation of new methods, ranging from radiometric dating to
thermochronometry to surface exposure dating, has generated exciting new scientific
opportunities and a large unmet demand for measurements. New mechanisms for
supporting geochronology laboratories will be required to efficiently develop these
opportunities and to promote continued technical advances in the coming decade. In
this regard, this aspect of EAR-funded facilities requires the special attention given in