The two Moon’s Grand Canyons were formed in less than 10 minutes

A gigantic influence 3.8 billion years ago sent a rock curtain flying away from a point near the south pole of the moon. When that curtain fell, its rocks dipped up to 3.5 kilometers on the lunar surface with energy 130 times more than the global inventory of nuclear weapons, new calculations show.

And this is how a hailstorm of stones carved two garband canyons on the moon in less than 10 minutes.

“They landed in a stoccato fashion, Bang-Bang-Bang-Bang-Bang,” says planetary geologist David Cring of the Lunar Institute and Planetary in Houston, who reports February 4 finding in The communications of nature.

Both channels, Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck, lie in straight lines from the 320-kilometer wide Schrödinger basin marking the initial impact. So far, the circumstances of canyon formation have been a mystery. The canyons are 270 and 280 kilometers long and up to 2.7 and 3.5 kilometers deep, respectively.

“The landscape of the southern moon polar region is so dramatic,” Kring says. “If it were to happen on land, it would be a national or international park.” Grand Canyon, for example winds for a 446 kilometers of sinusitis and is only 1.9 kilometers deep at its deepest point.

A tale of two canyons

A comparison of the width and depth of the Grand Canyon along Trail Hiking Angel Bright (Top) and Vallis Planck on the south pole of the moon (bottom). Colors each represents 500 meters high.

The South Pole also contains some of the oldest rocks on the moon, perhaps dating from its formation about 4 billion years ago. Collecting samples from there would allow scientists to try some of the greatest mysteries in the history of the moon.

But there is a possible problem. The Schrödinger Basin rim is about 125 kilometers from the predicted landing site of NASA Artemis Astronauts. If the impact that formed the rock sprinkled in all directions, those older rocks that could have been buried.

So Kring, along with geologists Danielle Kallenborn and Gareth Collins of Imperial College London, analyzed the spatial images of the Schrödinger Basin ship and its canyons to draw the physics of their formations. In addition to discovering that the origin of the canyons was fast and explosives, the team found that the straight lines converge towards the southern edge of the Schrödinger basin, non -medium. This convergence suggests that the influencing object entered the moon at an angle, and preferentially sprinkled material in the north, far from the exploration area of ​​Artemis.

“This means that very little of the Schrödinger material will bury this very old terrain,” Kring says. “We have an opportunity to look deeper into lunar history and better understand the earliest era of the Earth-Moon system.”