Why Earth Could Not Hold On to Its First Continents Until the Asteroids Stopped Falling
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An object ten kilometres across slams into a young Earth, and the rock does not just shatter. It vaporises. A shock wave tears outward, decays into heat, and that heat sinks downward into the mantle where it lingers, not for seconds or years but for tens of millions of years, keeping the crust above it soft as warm wax. Multiply that by hundreds of impacts. Then ask why our planet has any old rock at all.
For most of the first 500 million years of Earth’s history, it turns out, the answer
For most of the first 500 million years of Earth’s history, it turns out, the answer
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