Does the Moon Have Earthquakes?
No, silly. But it has surprisingly strong moonquakes. Oh, and watch out for the landslides!
Quakes on the moon are strong enough to crack a plaster wall or even topple a brick chimney. Those aren’t materials we’d probably use should we ever get around to building lunar colonies. But any settlers will want to be wary of future moonquakes and potentially dangerous landslides.
“Our modeling suggests that shallow moonquakes capable of producing strong ground shaking in the south polar region are possible from slip events on existing faults or the formation of new thrust faults,” said Thomas Watters, PhD, a senior scientist emeritus at the National Air and Space Museum.
Reporting Jan. 25 in the Planetary Science Journal, Watters and colleagues build on several previous studies of moonquakes and the shifty physics of the moon’s crust to highlight the risk of quake-induced landslides in an area of the moon targeted for NASA’s planned Artemis III landings, which would bring humans back to the moon.
Measuring moonquakes
The bulk of what we know about lunar temblors comes from five seismometers scattered around the surface of the moon, left there by Apollo astronauts between 1969 and 1972. The lunar seismometer data…
