Mineral-Water Interfacial Reactions:Kinetics and Mechanisms Chapter 1 Kinetics and Mechanisms of Reactions at the Mineral-Water Interface: An Overview The study of environmental aquatic chemistry has matured over the past 30 years and with it the understanding of natural aquatic systems has grown. One outgrowth of this more mature understanding is a realization that reactions occurring at mineral-water interfaces are central to many, perhaps most, processes of geochemical importance. The rates of many ecosystem scale or even global scale processes are controlled by mineral-water interfacial reactions. The centrality of reactions at mineral-water interfaces is not a new idea as evidenced by previous research compilations which have emphasized the mineral-water interface to varying degrees. Rapid advances were made in the 1980's with the advent of a variety of modern spectroscopic techniques that, for the first time, allowed the direct study of mineral surfaces. In the last decade, researchers have coupled the detailed knowledge of surface structure available from these spectroscopic techniques with experimental and modeling studies of macroscopic surface structure behavior. This synergism has resulted in a dramatic increase in the ability to decipher and predict both the mechanisms and kinetics of surface mediated reactions. It is these mechanisms and rates that form the central | 
