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. 2021 Oct 22;11:20894. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-99240-w

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Cartoon of element partitioning processes during Earth’s accretion according to our model. Accreting planetesimals and giant impactors deliver volatiles and simultaneously form a vapour plume eroding the atmosphere. (a) Model for the main accretion stage (10% to 99.5% of the Earth’s mass). Equilibration among the magma ocean (silicate melt), liquid metal droplets transiting to the core, and the overlying atmosphere are achieved according to each metal silicate partitioning coefficient and solubility. (b) Model for the late accretion stage after the solidification of the magma ocean (the last 0.5%). We consider the liquid water oceans and the carbonate-silicate cycle to be driven by plate tectonics on the surface. In this stage, most H and C on Earth are stored in the oceans and carbonate rocks, respectively. Numerous impactors can selectively erode N.