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Far from the cool cold stone imagined by modern science, Earth's Moon is actually tectonically active, according to researchers who triangulated earthquake data with fault locations. Even stranger, it may still be shrinking.
Comparing the lunar orbital images of NASA with the seismic surveys obtained nearly half a century ago with equipment left on the moon by the Apollo missions, the researchers believe they have discovered what is behind a diagram. mysterious moonquakes that have frustrated scientists for decades, apparently in the beginning. from the top few kilometers of the crust of the moon: our neighboring satellite, considered a cold and lifeless rock, is in fact geologically alive, just like the Earth.
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During the eight years of operation of the five Apollo seismometers, they captured 28 near – surface moonstones measuring the Earth 's equivalent of 2 to 5 on Moment Magnitude scale. By analyzing NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) images and using an Earth-based algorithm to more accurately locate the epicenters of these earthquakes, the researchers found that eight of them were Were produced within 30 km of "fault scarves, "Long cliff-shaped formations that crisscross the lunar terrain.
"It is very likely that these eight earthquakes were caused by faults that slipped under the effect of stress accumulation when the lunar crust was squeezed by global contraction and tidal forces., Said Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institute, lead author of an article on the findings published in Nature Geoscience on Monday. If that's the case, "the Apollo seismometers recorded the contraction of the moon and it is still active on the tectonic plane, "He said calling the results"unbelievable. "
While other seismic disturbances measured by the seismometers of the Apollo era could be attributed to the gravity of the Earth being felt across the space – in the same way as the attraction The gravitational movement of the moon causes the ascent and descent of the oceans, so that the Earth's gravitational attraction actually deforms the surface of the moon, stretching it slightly before releasing it into a sphere – impacts of the moon. asteroids, or temperature changes, "shallow"The moon quakes had already frustrated all attempts to study them. They seemed to begin in the upper few kilometers of the moon's crust, but the accepted wisdom is that the moon is a big dead rock. Even Watters, who published an article in 2010 analyzing the first images of NASA LRO's flaws, said the most recent breakaways were "as young as a hundred million years old. "
Although the theory remains a theory until scientists are able to conduct a more detailed study on the moon, the researchers made sure that the series of earthquakes and faults was not due to a coincidence, running 10,000 simulations of seismic events in order to replicate the model and come up with only a 1 percent chance that the queues had been random.
"For me, these results emphasize that we must return to the moonSaid researcher Nicholas Schmerr of the University of Maryland. "We learned a lot from the Apollo missions, but they only scratched the surface. With a larger network of modern seismometers, we could make enormous progress in our understanding of the geology of the moon.. "
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