Fig. 2

The pressure at the melting depth as a function of the mass of the growing planet for all accretional collisions that create an Earth-like planet. Results are shown for the three different N-body accretion models used in this study (Table 3). Melt pressures for planetesimal impacts are unrealistically high, because the planetesimals in the N-body models actually represent a swarm of numerous smaller bodies. Each of these smaller impacts would result in much smaller amounts of melting. Note that pressure is normalised to the core-mantle boundary pressure (P _CMB) at the time of each impact