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Last week we were reminded that Russia is planning on sending a manned rocket to the moon in August.
Just a few days after that announcement, Matt Siegler and his team at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona discovered that there is an unusually hot area on the moon located between the Compton and Belkovich craters that is over 30 miles across and several miles thick.
Perhaps the Russians can check this new discovery out personally.
“We have discovered extra heat coming out of the ground at a location on the Moon believed to be a long dead volcano which last erupted over 3.5 billion years ago,” Sigler said in a statement, adding, “To tell the truth we were a bit puzzled when we found it.”
After piecing “together the probable geologic cause of the heat anomaly,” Sigler and his team determined “the only solution that we can think of which produces that much heat is a large body of granite.”
As New Scientist explains, “The only way to produce all this heat on the moon is through the decay of radioactive elements such as thorium and uranium, and the best way to form such a concentration of those elements is through repeated melting of the rock via volcanism.”
“That little bit of thorium we saw at the surface is the tip of the iceberg of a huge body below the surface that was the plumbing system for this volcano,” said Siegler. “It pushes the boundaries of what we know about how volcanoes form and specifically how they form on the moon.”
In their report, published in the journal Nature, the researchers being by stating, “Granites are nearly absent in Solar Systems outside of Earth.”
“On Earth this kind of volcanism is driven by plate tectonics and water, but the moon doesn’t have either of those,” said Siegler. “People really hadn’t thought that volcanism at this scale could happen on the moon.”