[meteorite-list] Extreme melting event defines Earth's early history

[Darren Garrison]

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 01:43:53 -0500, "Sterling K. Webb" <kelly at bhil.com> wrote:

>    The notion that you can "make an Earth" out of 6000 billion billion tons of chondrites is as
>thoroughly discredited a notion as I can imagine.  This a very old notion (XIXth century) and was once
>very popular but it's like saying your findings "could mean that the Earth is not flat, but this
>explanation is unlikely."

I took it that by "chondritic" it was meant that, overall, the Earth was thought to have more or
less the overall "solar average" ratio of elements (excepting volitiles long drifted away).  Since
at least some chondrites come pretty close to that "solar average", I see how it is so unfair to say
that there wasn't a good sampling of the overall available building materials in at least some
classes of chondrites.  If chondrites with a close to "solar average" composition are close enough
to the Earth to be nudgable into an Earth-intercepting orbit, why would it be such a stretch to
think that the Earth could be made up of chondrites that, overall, averaged out to the "solar
average"?