Ever looked up and seen the ancient face of the “man on the moon”? He may have had some recent work done.
Scientists thought the moon has been cold and dead for roughly a billion years. But strange small features on the surface discovered by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal that volcanoes may have been active during the time of the dinosaurs. That’s practically just last week, by geological time scales.
There’s now evidence that the moon’s volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion years ago. Many distinctive rock deposits observed by the orbiter are estimated to be less than 100 million years old.
That corresponds to Earth’s Cretaceous period, the heyday of dinosaurs. Some areas may be less than 50 million years old.
“This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
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