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Planetary science

A new recipe for Earth formation

Nature volume 520, pages 299–300 (2015)Cite this article

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Experimental results suggest that if Earth initially grew by the accumulation of highly chemically reduced material, its core could contain enough uranium to drive the planet's magnetic field throughout Earth's history. See Letter p.337

Determining Earth's bulk composition is difficult because so little of the planet is directly accessible. As a result, most estimates derive from a comparison of Earth rocks with the planet's probable building blocks — the asteroidal bodies sampled by meteorites. New views about the mechanism of planet formation, and their consequences for estimating Earth's composition, are, surprisingly, being driven by observations of planetary systems around stars other than the Sun. On page 337 of this issue, Wohlers and Wood1 report experiments that explore the consequences of one of these views — that the building blocks of Earth systematically changed composition during its growth. Their results lead to the intriguing conclusion that if Earth formation started with highly chemically reduced building blocks, the planet's metallic core might contain enough uranium to power the convection that creates, and has maintained, Earth's magnetic field for more than 3 billion years.

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Figure 1: Mercury's surface.

NASA/Johns Hopkins Univ. Applied Physics Lab./Carnegie Inst. Washington

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  1. Richard W. Carlson is in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC 20015, USA.,

    Richard W. Carlson

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  1. Richard W. Carlson
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Correspondence to Richard W. Carlson.

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Carlson, R. A new recipe for Earth formation. Nature 520, 299–300 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520299a

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