Summary

We are confident that MYRES will provide a unique opportunity for independent and critical discourse and a setting that will allow new ideas and research strategies to flourish. Junior members of the community will be able to interact with a larger pool of peers more quickly. By educating each other across disciplines, we can achieve a better understanding of the nature of constraints and possible solution strategies for fundamental problems in the Earth Sciences. This grass-roots community building effort will help to make better use of tools and data and so improve the efficiency in turning scientific resources into an improved understanding of how the Earth works.

Acknowledgments

We have greatly benefited from the feedback we got from several junior and senior members of the community on an earlier version of this document, and from discussions during the NSF sponsored May 2003 CIDER workshop in Pt. Reyes, CA, as well as the June 2003 Gordon Research Conference on the Interior of the Earth.

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