Researchers have discovered a system of ridges spread across the nearside of the Moon topped with freshly exposed boulders.
Researchers have discovered a system of ridges spread across the nearside of the Moon topped with freshly exposed boulders. The ridges could be evidence of active lunar tectonic processes, the researchers say, possibly the echo of a long-ago impact that nearly tore the Moon apart.
“There’s this assumption that the Moon is long dead, but we keep finding that that’s not the case,” said Peter Schultz, a professor in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and co-author of the research, which is published in the journal Geology. “From this paper it appears that the Moon may still be creaking and cracking — potentially in the present day — and we can see the evidence on these ridges.”
Most of the Moon’s surface is covered by regolith, a powdery blanket of ground-up rock created by the constant bombardment of tiny meteorites and other impactors. Areas free of regolith where the Moon’s bedrock is exposed are vanishingly rare. But Adomas Valantinas, a graduate student at the University of Bern who led the research while a visiting scholar at Brown, used data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to spot strange bare spots within and surrounding the lunar maria, the large dark patches on the Moon’s nearside.
Read more at Brown University
Image: Infrared (upper left) and other images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed strange bare spots where the Moon's ubiquitous dust is missing. The spots suggest an active tectonic process. CREDIT: NASA
