Earth-style quakes are wrinkling it ‘like a raisin’
The moon is shrinking because of clashing tectonic plates triggering ‘moonquakes’, according to new research.Each is roughly ten yards high and a few miles long – making them resemble giant stairway on the lunar surface. They were first discovered more than 50 years ago by the Apollo astronauts.Scientists superimposed epicentre location data onto images of the scarps from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter .
The discovery of young faults less than 50 million years old by the LRO’s camera in 2010 has been interpreted as evidence of lunar tectonic activity. But it was unclear how fresh this was. So the US and Canadian team examined quakes recorded by seismometers at the landing sites of Apollo 12, 14, 15 and 16. Using an algorithm they found the epicentres of eight of the quakes – more than a quarter – were within 19 miles of scarps visible in the LRO images.
But the moon is likely experiencing quakes to this day, say the researchers. On Earth the shallow quakes – the type produced by tectonic faults – would have ranged in magnitude from about 2 to 5 on the Richter scale. This would be enough to damage buildings and other structures.The researchers also found six of the eight quakes happened when the moon was at or near its apogee – the point in the moon’s orbit when it is farthest from Earth.
The LRO has imaged more than 3,500 fault scarps on the moon since it began operation in 2009. Some of these images show landslides or boulders at the bottom of relatively bright patches on the slopes of fault scarps or nearby terrain. Because weathering gradually darkens material on the lunar surface, brighter areas indicate regions that are freshly exposed by an event such as a moonquake.
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