Indeed, new photos of the moon show cracks along the surface. The study’s lead author Thomas Watters noted it was a “surprise” the Earth is still helping shape the moon’s structure, though it makes sense, since they have always played such a major part in one another’s origins.
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The moon’s “pull” on Earth causes tides in our oceans – and now scientists believe our planet is pulling up, as the moon gradually moves away from Earth.
The researchers analyzed information from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(LRO), which launched in 2009. LRO captured high-resolution images showing 14 lobe-shaped fault scarps, or cliffs, which likely formed as the hot interior of the moon cooled and contracted, forcing the solid crust to buckle. But now after the six of years of orbiting, it has been able to identify more lunar surface with fault scarps and more scraps are expected to be discover as coverage increases.
The researchers say that if the only influence on lunar scarp formation was the interior cooling, the orientations of these cliffs should be random because the forces of contraction would be equal in strength in all directions.
“It was a giant shock to seek out that the fault scarps do not have random orientations”, Watters mentioned.
‘”There is a pattern in the orientations of the thousands of faults, and it suggests something else is influencing their formation, something that’s also acting on a global scale, ‘ said NASA’s Tom Watters”. The gravitational pull generates stresses, pushes crust materials together, breaks and thrusts them upward. The tidal forces are strongest in the areas of the moon farthest, and closest, to the moon. These opposing effects have been known for a long period of time, but lately it was confirmed that the Earth’s gravity pull can actually open cracks on the surface of the moon. The result is that many scarps are lined up north to south at low and mid latitudes near the moon’s equator and east to west at high latitudes near the moon’s poles.
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If seeing from moon during a total lunar eclipse, earth appears to have a thin ring of red light around it. The red light which is much dimmer than the full light from the sun reflects off the moon and comes back toward earth. If this is the case, then there are likely “moonquakes”, which a network of seismometers could one day pick up.
