In this lecture, Professor Lybrand and I are going to take you from Earth’s deepest trenches of the oceans to the tallest mountains – we want to understand Earth across scales from the entire lithosphere that have created unique landforms to the individual rocks that make up those landforms—rocks that are made up of minerals, which are simply atoms. And of course, we want to understand what it means for us as earth system scientists. We are interested in how energy, matter, and even species might intersect with the lithosphere and its rocks. This is our goal for today.