A Mercury-sized planetary embryo that slammed into Earth around 4.4 billion years ago delivered virtually all of the planet's carbon, new research suggests.
Experiments simulating the dense, hot conditions of the deep Earth by Yuan Li from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Rajdeep Dasgupta from Rice University in the US, and colleagues provide an explanation to the mystery of how Earth seeded life when the lion’s share of carbon should have boiled away into space or been trapped deep in the core.
The work was published in Nature Geosciences.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/geoscience/p ... -ago-study