Comment by adrian_b

5 days ago

No, the 5-10% mass was not mostly carbon. It was also mostly oxygen with smaller amounts of iron, silicon and magnesium, like in any parts of the Solar System where the gravity is not so strong as to retain most of the hydrogen and helium.

That mass has come from bodies which have collided with Earth and which had a chemical composition similar to that of "carbonaceous chondrites". (That is a kind of meteorites; most of the Earth had a composition similar to "enstatite chondrites", another kind of meteorites.)

The carbonaceous chondrites are not made of carbon, they only have more carbon than the Earth and similar planets, because in the early Solar System the carbon was present mostly as carbon dioxide, which is volatile so that most of it does not condense into the planets at the higher temperatures of the zones closer to the Sun, where the inner planets have condensed, but only at lower temperatures, farther from the Sun, where it reacts with metallic oxides, forming solid carbonates, like limestone.