Our moon is shrinking…

Our moon is shrinking…

AgenciesUpdated: Wednesday, May 29, 2019, 08:08 PM IST
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Image Source: Bruno Scramgnon |

Washington: The Moon is shrinking as its interior cools — getting over 50 metres skinnier through the last several hundred million years — and causing quakes on the lunar surface, a study has found. Just as a grape wrinkles as it shrinks down to a raisin, the Moon gets wrinkles as it shrinks, researchers said.

Unlike the flexible skin on a grape, the Moon’s surface crust is brittle, so it breaks as the Moon shrinks, forming “thrust faults” where one section of crust is pushed up over a neighbouring part.

“Our analysis gives the first evidence that these faults are still active and likely producing moonquakes today as the Moon continues to gradually cool and shrink,” said Thomas Watters, senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in the US. “Some of these quakes can be fairly strong, around five on the Richter scale,” Watters said.

These fault scarps resemble small stair-step shaped cliffs when seen from the lunar surface, typically tens of metres high and extending for several kilometers. The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, analysed data from four seismometers placed on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts using an algorithm, or mathematical programme, developed to pinpoint quake locations detected by a sparse seismic network.

The algorithm gave a better estimate of moonquake locations. Seismometers are instruments that measure the shaking produced by quakes, recording the arrival time and strength of various quake waves to get a location estimate, called an epicenter.

Astronauts placed the instruments on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, and 16 missions. The Apollo 11 seismometer operated only for three weeks, but the four remaining recorded 28 shallow moonquakes — the type expected to be produced by these faults — from 1969 to 1977.

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