The latest in nanoscale drivers of large-scale Earth processes

Moving across scales (atomic/nanoscale to local/regional/global) in Earth geochemical process science has become much more precise, dependable, and useful. This is, in large part, due to the latest developments in electron beam microscopies/spectroscopies, synchrotron-light-based microscopies/spectroscopies, and mass spectroscopies targeting single atoms, molecules, and nanoparticles. With these tools, it is possible to determine detailed descriptions of complex phases, as well as chemical and physical processes, all at the finest scales. Results include (just to name two of them): 1) finding/locating and confirming phases that were never known or suspected to exist, these often key materials that explain Earth system processes on much larger scales; and 2) gaining an understanding, often for the first time, of completely different materials behaviors at the smallest of scales, vastly different than the properties of these same or very similar materials in the macroscopic state (the concept of property variation as a function of size and shape). Further, the Earth has always been a prodigious producer of nanophases. And analogous to the fact that humans have become a geologic force in their collective actions, it has now been recognized that since the Industrial Revolution roughly two and a half centuries ago, there has been a massive influx of incidental nanomaterials that also affect planetary processes, just as naturally-occurring nanomaterials do. Examples of all of the above include, listed here moving from the local, to the regional, and finally to the global scales, 1) the discovery of nanoscale features in soils that record past natural and anthropogenic events, such as natural weathering, followed by the impact of land/air contamination from mining over local to regional areas, and finally followed by the effects of remediation; 2) the realization of the role that naturally-occurring nano-thin semiconducting Fe- and Mn-(oxyhydr)oxide-mineral coatings having on regional to global photon-induced redox chemistry; and 3) the discovery that coal burning results in the massive production and global distribution of otherwise rare Magnéli phases (titanium sub-oxides), and that these Magnéli phases show both in vitro and in vivo human lung toxicity behavior.