This is Scientific American 62nd Science.

I'm Julia Rosen.

The other rocky planets in our solar system show a common feature.

Within giant craters caused by impacts there's evidence of volcanic activity which made

scientists wonder can big impacts actually cause volcanic eruptions and has

that scenario ever happened here?

To find out, scientists went to one of the few massive craters on Earth not erased by plate tectonics,

the Sudbury crater in Canada.

Sudbury is a 1.85 billion years old impact structure.

Theresa Ubide, a geochemist at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Sudbury was generated when a bawlide of 10 to 15 kilometers in diameter hit Earth.

And what happened was it obviously generated a large basin and also melted the crust on top of the earth at that time and generated a massive melt pool 2.5 kilometers in depth.

But Ubidi and her colleagues found that the impact did more than that.

It also seems to have triggered eruptions of magma that came from deep in the mantle.

The evidence lies in the fact that the chemistry of the lava that erupted at Sudbury

changed over time.

At first, it matched the surface rocks, suggesting it was just from local melting.

But as the eruptions continued,

the lava appeared to come from deep in the mantle,

suggesting the impact stirred things up inside the earth.

No one

possible explanation is that after the object

...