18.01.2019

Earth and the moon are two peas in a pod, at least when it comes to being pummelled by space rocks. A new analysis has found that impacts causing relatively large craters happen equally as often on both worlds, and there was a massive increase in these big hits about 290 million years ago.

On a cosmic scale, Earth and the moon are at essentially the same spot in space. That means that they should be hit by about the same number of meteorites, but a common assumption is that erosion on Earth – but not on the moon, which is not geologically active – would erase some of the resulting large craters, along with almost all of the small ones.

Sara Mazrouei at the University of Toronto in Canada and her colleagues used data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to examine craters on the moon and determine if the frequency of craters more than 10 kilometres across is the same on Earth and the moon.

Dr. A. Parker, Southwest Research Institute

They found a striking match between the two, indicating that erosion might not be as destructive to large craters as we thought. They also found another surprise: about 290 million years ago, the rate of impacts causing these large craters increased by a factor of about 2.6 compared to the previous 700 million years.

“This work has some very interesting implications for the cause of this uptick in the cratering rate,” says Meenakshi Wadhwa at Arizona State University. It could indicate that one or more large asteroids in the asteroid belt broke up around that time, sending a rain of shrapnel towards the inner solar system, she says.

That shrapnel could have had a significant effect on life on Earth, and it may even be connected to the impact thought to have killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, says Mazrouei.

“We can’t say that impacts are a cause of an extinction feature for example a mass extinction event,” she says. “But if you are getting bombarded by asteroids at a global scale, that could cause global effects.”

Quelle: NewScientist

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SwRI SCIENTISTS STUDY MOON CRATERS TO UNDERSTAND EARTH’S IMPACT HISTORY

Using images and thermal data collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Southwest Research Institute scientists and their collaborators have calculated the ages of large lunar craters across the Moon to be less than 1 billion years. By comparing the impact history of the Moon with Earth’s craters over this interval, they discovered that the rate of sizable asteroid collisions has increased by a factor of two to three on both bodies over the last 290 million years.

For decades, scientists have tried to understand the rate that asteroids hit the Earth by carefully studying impact craters and by using radiometric dating of the rocks around them. Earth has fewer older craters than expected compared to other bodies in the solar system, making it difficult to find an accurate impact rate and to determine if it has changed over time. Many experts assumed that the earliest Earth craters may have been worn away by wind, storms and geologic processes, mechanisms not present on the Moon.

“What this research uncovered is that the Earth has fewer older craters on stable terrains not because of erosion, but because the impact rate was lower prior to 290 million years ago,” said SwRI’s William Bottke, an asteroid expert who coauthored a paper outlining the research published January 18 in the journal Science. “The Moon is like a time capsule, helping us understand the Earth. We found that the Moon shared a similar bombardment history, which meant the answer to Earth’s impact rate was staring everyone right in the face.”

Though large impacts are rare, the Earth and the Moon are hit in the same proportions over time. Lunar craters experience little erosion over billions of years, but scientists could not pinpoint their ages until the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) started circling the Moon a decade ago, studying its surface.

LRO’s thermal radiometer, called Diviner, measures the heat radiating off the Moon’s surface. By looking at these data during the lunar night, scientists measured how much of the surface is covered by large, warm rocks, versus cooler, fine-grained lunar soil. Large impact craters formed in the last billion years are littered with boulders and rocks, while older craters are smoother. Using a relatively new technique to calculate how long it takes to reduce lunar stones into soil, the paper’s first author Sara Mazrouei and coauthor Rebecca Ghent at the University of Toronto calculated the ages of all lunar craters to be younger than about a billion years.

The work paid off, returning several unexpected findings. First, the team discovered that the rate of large crater formation on the Moon was about two to three times higher over the last 290 million years than over the previous 700 million years. The reason for this jump in the impact rate is unknown. It might be related to large collisions taking place more than 300 million years ago in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Such events can create debris that ultimately penetrates the inner solar system.   

The second surprise came from comparing the ages of large craters on the Moon to those on Earth. Their similar size and age distributions challenge the theory that Earth had lost so many craters through erosion on stable terrains back to 650 million years ago.

Scientists confirmed this deduction by studying kimberlite pipes — long-extinct volcanoes that stretch, in a carrot shape, a couple of kilometers below the surface. Scientists know a lot about the ages and rate of erosion of kimberlite pipes because they are widely mined for diamonds. They also are located on some of the least eroded regions of the Earth, the same places where we find preserved impact craters. Tom Gernon, a coauthor and earth scientist based at the University of Southampton in England, showed that kimberlite pipes formed in the last 650 million years on stable terrains had not experienced much erosion, indicating that the large impact craters younger than this in the same regions must also be intact. “So that’s how we know those craters represent a near-complete record,” Ghent said.

“We can now apply this technique to study the surfaces of other planets to find out if they might also show more impacts,” Bottke said. “Our findings also have implications for the history of life, which is punctuated by extinction events and rapid evolution of new species. Though the forces driving these events are complicated, asteroid impacts have surely played a role in this ongoing saga.”

The research for the paper, titled “Earth and Moon impact flux increased at the end of the Paleozoic,” was funded in part by NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI). SwRI researchers serve on 13 teams within SSERVI, which is based and managed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. SSERVI is funded by the Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. For more about SSERVI, visit sservi.nasa.gov(link is external).

Image Courtesy of NASA/LRO/USGS/University of Toronto SwRI was part of a team that used Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data to study the Moon’s craters, scaled by size and color-coded by age here, to understand the impact history of the Earth. The lunar surface is dominated by blue craters younger than 290 million years old, which is consistent with those on Earth, indicating that bombardments on both bodies has increased since that time.

NASA/LRO/University of Southampton/University of Toronto

Quelle: Southwest Research Institute