This innovative series provides authoritative, concise overviews of the many novel isotope and elemental systems that can be used as ‘proxies’ or ‘geochemical tracers’ to reconstruct past environments over thousands to millions to billions of years—from the evolving chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans to their cause-and-effect relationships with life. 

Covering a wide variety of geochemical tracers, this series will review each method in terms of the geochemical underpinnings, the promises and pitfalls, and the ‘state-of-the-art’ and future prospects. Conceived from the start for a digital environment, this series will provide a dynamic reference resource for graduate students, researchers and scientists in geochemistry, astrobiology, paleontology, paleoceanography and paleoclimatology.

Short, timely, broadly accessible papers will provide much-needed primers for a wide audience—highlighting the cutting-edge of both new and established proxies as applied to diverse questions about Earth system evolution over wide-ranging time scales.