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… We don’t quite know what fraction melted, what vaporized, what stayed solid.”įor some unknown reason, however, there was more matter than antimatter, so some of it remained, with no antimatter to annihilate it.

If so, he said, “it’s quite possible that by probing material from the deep Earth we may learn something more about the different formation stages of the Earth, how it was put together. His analysis of material from deep within the Earth, retrieved from places like Iceland and Hawaii where “mantle plumes” force material up through volcanoes, suggests that although the impact released enough energy to totally melt both planets, the opposite side of proto-Earth was shielded, remained partly solid, and likely settled into a layer down near the modern Earth’s molten iron core where it might still be recoverable. “Subsequent to that bad day, it was a good thing,” Prof. Instead of planetary destruction, however, all these calamities were crucial to the eventual formation of the Earth’s protective atmosphere, the cycles of the seasons, the preservation of the polar ice caps, the movement of the moon-driven tides and the emergence of life. The cataclysmic meeting of the proto-Earth and the smaller, Mars-sized planet Theia - known as the Big Splash - set the Earth spinning faster than ever, tilted its axis by 23 degrees, and created the moon from the debris that was blasted into orbit. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.