This Proposal requests funding for a 2-day workshop to bring together a broad international community of practitioners and users of in situ produced cosmic-ray nuclides to build the CRONUS-Earth project. The idea for the project grew out of an initial workshop hosted by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory on 17-19 March 2002. This first meeting was directed at outlining the state of the art and formulating a list of scientific problems that needed to be addressed in order to bring the technique into routine usage. The goal of this second workshop, is to disseminate general information about the state of the science, to solicit ideas for new aspects of the project that were not addressed in the first workshop and to formulate an outline for the final CRONUS-Earth project to be submitted to the NSF and EU. As this workshop will bring together most of the leaders in the field from around the world we anticipate that aside from the CRONUS-Earth proposal, we will be able to formulate guidelines for the use of the technique in the absence of the data that CRONUS-Earth will provide. This alone should be of great use to the community as a whole, as presently the application of this singularly powerful technique is not uniform across groups or labs. Thus, at a minimum, the discussion and outreach that this forum can provide will give the community a clearer view of this extremely important tool both with respect its potential, as well as to its present limitations.
