Abstract
The 142Nd/144Nd ratio of the Earth is greater than the solar ratio as inferred from chondritic meteorites, which challenges a fundamental assumption of modern geochemistry—that the composition of the silicate Earth is ‘chondritic’, meaning that it has refractory element ratios identical to those found in chondrites. The popular explanation for this and other paradoxes of mantle geochemistry, a hidden layer deep in the mantle enriched in incompatible elements, is inconsistent with the heat flux carried by mantle plumes. Either the matter from which the Earth formed was not chondritic, or the Earth has lost matter by collisional erosion in the later stages of planet formation.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Y. Amelin and R. Taylor for their comments on an early draft of the paper, C. Allen for preparing Fig. 1 and R. Carlson and B. Bourdon for their detailed and constructive reviews.
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Campbell, I., St C. O’Neill, H. Evidence against a chondritic Earth. Nature 483, 553–558 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10901
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10901
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