When you think about a large asteroid impact, you might imagine a moment of devastation: a violent collision, a blast of heat and debris, and then years of atmospheric disruption and damage left behind.

But on the early Earth, the most important effect may not have been the crater and its aftermath. It may have been the heat from the impact, driven deep into our planet’s interior.

In our new study, we argue that the long-lived effect of this impact heating has been greatly underappreciated in models of the Hadean eon — the first half-billion years of Earth’s history.

Rather than acting as brief interruptions to a planet cooling from within, repeated impacts kept the surface, or protocrust, of the young Earth hot, weak, and geologically unstable for a very long time.

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#Earth#Heating#Science#Volcanism
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