As awesome as our ancestors must have found the Biblical explanation of the Earth's origin, few are likely to have imagined anything as spectacular as the scenario for the formation of the Earth and moon described here. The author envisions the Earth accreting from a collection of objects ranging in size from dust particles up to small planets 1,000 km in radius. As the protoearth and its gravitational field grew, so too did the kinetic energy of the incoming objects and the violence of their impacts with the growing Earth. Vaporization of the volatile constituents of the incoming bodies during these impacts led to the growth of a massive primitive atmosphere that interacted with accreting material
