EarthRates is an NSF-sponsored Research Coordination Network (RCN) aimed at providing the framework and opportunity to engage four critical communities and forge synergistic collaborations in order to foster transdisciplinary research in the sedimentary crust. We are also working to bring together NSF sponsored community-driven entities to strategize, leverage and build partnerships and collaborative efforts to enable the community to address major grand challenges in Earth system science. These would include: 1) how rates of change in Earth’s sedimentary crust have changed through time, and what does this tell us about the future trajectory of the integrated Earth system? and 2) what are the ranges of rates of ecosystem and sedimentary basin response to change in different Earth-system states? By bringing these groups together and building stronger partnerships and alliances, we will move towards the goal of developing a fully integrated four-dimensional digital Earth to fully understand dynamic Earth system evolution.