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Early Earth

Hard core constraints on accretion

Nature Geoscience volume 3, pages 382–383 (2010)Cite this article

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The duration of Earth's creation remains unknown. Elegant modelling of the Earth's core formation reaffirms that the bulk of accretion occurred within a few tens of millions of years, but another 100 million years or so were needed to finish the job.

The metallic interior of the Earth is the dominant repository for many of the planet's elements. The core hosts the bulk of Earth's precious metals — quite enough to resolve the consequences of recent banking failures. Indeed, the high abundance of elements such as gold in the core is the chief cause of their surface scarcity, and hence their value. Precisely determining the timing and conditions of core formation on Earth is a major prize in Earth science. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Rudge and colleagues1 consider a wide range of geochemical observations and present a novel re-evaluation of these constraints for the construction of the planet.

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Figure 1: The Earth grew through the accretion of many planetary embryos.

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  1. Tim Elliott is in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building, Queen's Road, Bristol BS8 1RJ, UK. Tim.Elliott@bristol.ac.uk,

    Tim Elliott

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  1. Tim Elliott
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Elliott, T. Hard core constraints on accretion. Nature Geosci 3, 382–383 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo883

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