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Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin with the seismic experiment Credit: NASA (usage does not imply endorsement of site contents) |
To read the rest, blast off for "Moon Is Unexpectedly Still Cooling and Shrinking".Scientists have concluded that our moon is probably still in the process of slightly shrinking as it cools.Photographs from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) showed embankments called scarps on the moon’s surface. These scarps are caused by a slight contraction of the moon’s crust as it cools. The moon’s cooling creates thrust faults which push up small sections of the surface, forming scarps.Because these scarps sometimes distort small craters when they form, scientists inferred that the scarps formed in the relatively recent past. This is because larger meteorite impacts eventually deface or destroy smaller craters. Since these smaller craters had not yet been defaced by more recent large impacts, we know these small craters are quite young. And since the scarps distorted these young craters as the scarps formed, the scarps have to be even younger than the small craters.
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