The Moon shrinks and creases under the effect of earthquakes: study – crunches and shifts

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Last Updated: May 14, 2019, 13:52 IST

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Cracking and displacement

According to an analysis of images captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), released Monday, the Moon is shrinking regularly, causing wrinkles on its surface and earthquakes.

A study of more than 12,000 images revealed that the Moon Frigoris Lunar Basin, located near the North Pole of the Moon – one of the many large basins considered for a long time as dead sites from a point of view geological – it's cracked and changed.

AFP

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Tectonic activity causing wrinkles

Unlike our planet, the moon does not have tectonic plates; instead, its tectonic activity occurs because it slowly loses heat since its formation, 4.5 billion years ago.

This in turn causes a wrinkle, similar to a grape that shrivels in grapes.

AFP

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150 feet "thinner"

As the crust of the moon is fragile, these forces cause the surface to rupture when the interior narrows, giving rise to thrust faults, where part of the crust is pushed onto an adjacent part.

As a result, the moon has become "finer" at about 50 meters (50 meters) in the last few hundred million years.

AFP

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Young surface features

Apollo astronauts began to measure seismic activity on the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s; they found that the vast majority of these had occurred inside the body, while a smaller number were on the surface.

The analysis was published in Nature Geoscience and examined the shallow moonquakes recorded by the Apollo missions, establishing links between them and very young surface elements.

Default agency

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Moonquakes

"It is highly likely that the flaws are still active today," said Nicholas Schmerr, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Maryland, co-author of the study.

"You do not often see active tectonics elsewhere than on Earth, so it's very exciting to think that these faults can still produce moonstones."

(In the photo: Astronaut James Irwin makes a salute by standing near the American flag during the Apollo 15 mission on the moon.)

AFP

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