Impact cratering was a dominant geologic process in the early Solar System that probably
played an active role in the crustal evolution of the young terrestrial planets. The Earth's
interior during the Hadean, 4.56 to 4 billion years ago, may have been too hot to sustain
plate tectonics. However, whether large impacts could have triggered tectonism on the early
Earth remains unclear. Here we conduct global-scale tectonic simulations of the evolution of
the Earth through the Hadean eon under variable impact fluxes. Our simulations show that …