Study: Shrinking moon may produce maanbevingen

Science & planet The moon is slowly cooling down, allowing them to shrink. For example, scientists found that the moon for the past few hundred million years approximately fifty diameter has become smaller. Data from the Apollo missions shows that the moon may still tectonically active, which may be accompanied by ‘maanbevingen’. That message the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

Four different seismometers detecteerden 28 shallow maanbevingen during the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1977. These tremors had a force of two to five on the Richter scale. About eight of the maanbevingen took place near young cracks or fault lines in the surface of the moon. To illustrate: such cracks are similar to cliffs a few meters of depth. They arise by a horizontal contraction of the maankorst, because the moon is still cooling down.

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NASA has with the help of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which, since 2009, recording, 3.500 fault lines discovered. Scientists led by Thomas Watters of The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington reviewed recently again about these results and investigated whether there is a link between the shallow maanbevingen, which took place between 1969 and 1977, and the more recent fault lines on the moon. The research team drew on the basis of the data, a remarkable conclusion: the moon would be, just as our planet is still tectonically active.

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