Strange Blobs Deep Within Earth May Have Created Plate Tectonics

On the scale of benign to cataclysmic events, the whomping impact of a Mars-sized object that crashed into Earth some 4.5 billion years ago ranks pretty highly: thought to have set in motion the movement of our planet's fractured, rocky crust, new research suggests.either temperature hotspots, a magma 'ocean' deep beneath our watery ones, or old, sunken tectonic plates.

Now, a new study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology suggests that Theia might be the reason for the turbulence of that very mantle and the movement of tectonic plates on its surface. "The giant impact is not only the reason for our moon, if that's the case, it also set the initial conditions of our Earth," Caltech geoscientist Qian Yuan, who led the study,describing how part of Theia could have sunk towards Earth's core after impact and survived to the present day, Yuan and his Caltech colleagues set about understanding what happened next.

"In this study, we perform whole‐mantle convection models to illustrate that strong mantle plumes can arise, weaken the lithosphere, and eventually initiate subduction 200 million years after the giant impact," Yuan and colleagues Models of the strange blobs, also known as large low‐shear velocity provinces , show how they generated mantle plumes and initiated subduction over 111 million years. penetrate the lithosphere and melt Earth's crust , creating tectonic plates and kickstarting subduction. (, their findings exemplify"the pivotal influence of initial conditions set by giant impact processes for the tectonic evolution of terrestrial planets.

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