Earth is made up of many different types of phases and especially in the crust their distribution is highly variable. The physical and chemical properties and the behavior of minerals, melts and fluids under various P-T-X conditions affect the nature of geologic processes. This session will be devoted to experimental, field and computational studies of Earth materials. This includes minerals, glasses, fluids, and nanophases as well as surface interactions. An emphasis will be made on describing, and in turn understanding, Earth material behavior from the micro to nano to macroscopic scale. Several areas will receive special emphasis such as structure-property relationships, spectroscopy and molecular and/or local structural behavior, lattice dynamic and macroscopic thermodynamic properties, and nanophases.