Recent Study Shows That The Moon Is Geologically Alive And It Is Shrinking

According to the scientist, it is found that our Moon is still tectonically active and it is shrinking on a big scale. After comparing the images and readings recorded by NASA about 50-years-ago with the help of the equipment which was left on the moon by Apollo missions. Now, the researchers claim that they have found the epicenter of the moonquakes as its origin is towards the upside of the moon’s crust which proves that Moon is geologically alive.

Image Source: Reuters / NASA

Five Apollo seismometers read 28 moonquakes in the last 8 years which is about 2 and 5 of the Moment Magnitude scale comparing to Earth. The researcher found out that eight of the moonquakes were between the 19-mile radius of “fault scraps”. The researches recorded the data with the help of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and using an earth-based algorithm.

Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institute, lead author of a paper on the findings published in Nature Geoscience conveyed on Monday, It’s very likely that these eight quakes were produced by faults slipping as stress built up when the lunar crust was compressed by global contraction and tidal forces, If so the Apollo seismometers recorded the shrinking moon and the moon is still tectonically active,” he said, calling the results “amazing.” The researchers have run 10,000 simulations to look for the patterns of the moonquakes but ultimately the data just remains a theory unless and until the researchers come out with more relevant data on the moon.

The researcher Nicholas Schmerr of the University of Maryland shared, “For me, these findings emphasize that we need to go back to the moon, e learned a lot from the Apollo missions, but they really only scratched the surface. With a larger network of modern seismometers, we could make huge strides in our understanding of the moon’s geology.”