A giant impact 3.8 billion years ago sent a curtain of rock flying away from a point near the moon’s south pole. When that curtain fell, its rocks plunged up to 3.5 kilometers into the lunar surface with energies 130 times greater than the global inventory of nuclear weapons, new calculations show.
And that’s how a hailstorm of boulders carved out two gargantuan canyons on the moon in less than 10 minutes.
“They landed in a staccato fashion, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang,” says planetary geologist David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who reports the finding February 4 in Nature Communications.
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