" buried deep within Earth's interior — an impact so violent that it ejected enough material to allow the Moon to form., scientists are also coming to suspect that these buried blogs may have led to the development of plate tectonics as well, the geological processes that were integral to the formation of life on Earth and still trigger earthquakes and volcanoes to this day.
The researchers believe that roughly 200 million years following the impact, these blobs kickstarted "strong mantle plumes" that initiated a process called subduction, with slabs of the Earth's crust sinking below other slabs. "The models link the earliest subduction to the with implications for understanding the diverse tectonic regimes of rocky planets," the researchers wrote in their paper.