The Earth does not have a good record of continental crust, or even plate tectonics, for the first 500 million years of its life. A new model shows that the early crust was simply too soft to preserve continental crust or behave like modern plate tectonics because of repeated impacts from large asteroids and associated heat. Without a record of such impacts in Earth's early, unpreserved crust, researchers looked toward the moon to assess how often and how big the early impacts would have been, and modeled heat flux into the mantle from those impacts. #EarthScience #DynamicPlanet #EarthsCrust #geology https://scienceblog.com/why-earth-could-not-hold-on-to-its-first-continents-until-the-asteroids-stopped-falling/