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Keyword: lunarcapture

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  • Geologists dig into Grand Canyon's mysterious gap in time

    08/22/2021 10:16:24 AM PDT · by BenLurkin · 63 replies
    Pys.org ^ | August 19, 2021 | University of Colorado at Boulder
    Think of the red bluffs and cliffs of the Grand Canyon as Earth's history textbook, explained Barra Peak, lead author of the new study and a graduate student in geological sciences at CU Boulder. If you scale down the canyon's rock faces, you can jump back almost 2 billion years into the planet's past. But that textbook is also missing pages: In some areas, more than 1 billion years' worth of rocks have disappeared from the Grand Canyon without a trace. It's a mystery that goes back a long way. John Wesley Powell, the namesake of today's Lake Powell, first...
  • Mysterious melting of Earth’s crust in Western North America, from BC, Canada to Sonora, Mexico

    04/29/2021 9:31:37 AM PDT · by Roman_War_Criminal · 29 replies
    SS ^ | 4.28/21 | SS
    A group of University of Wyoming professors and students has identified an unusual belt of igneous rocks that stretches for over 2,000 miles from British Columbia, Canada, through Idaho, Montana, Nevada, southeast California and Arizona to Sonora, Mexico. “Geoscientists usually associate long belts of igneous rocks with chains of volcanoes at subduction zones, like Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainer,” says Jay Chapman, an assistant professor in UW’s Department of Geology and Geophysics. “What makes this finding so interesting and mysterious is that this belt of igneous rocks is located much farther inland, away from the...
  • Explosive volcanoes ended Earth's time as a snowball: Huge eruptions broke our planet's deep freeze

    01/18/2016 9:00:01 PM PST · by BenLurkin · 34 replies
    MailOnline ^ | 01/18/2016 | Ryan O'Hare for
    In our planet's early history, 720 to 640 million years ago, thick sheets of ice covered the majority of the surface, as the Earth was locked in a deep freeze. But explosive underwater volcanoes changed the chemistry of the Earth's oceans and were key to breaking the planet from its icy state, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Southampton believe underwater volcanoes helped to thaw out "Snowball Earth", and even led to runaway chemical chain reactions, which created the conditions for an explosion of life on Earth. While much of the driving forces behind glaciation during...
  • How the American West was made -- a new view of plate tectonics

    04/03/2013 9:43:54 PM PDT · by BenLurkin · 11 replies
    LATimes ^ | April 3, 2013, 3:49 p.m. | Monte Morin
    It's long been held that North America's rugged and mountainous west was formed by the movement of the undersea Farallon plate, and that the process was roughly similar to the way groceries pile up at the end of a supermarket conveyor belt. Now however, a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature argues that the process involved not just one but several plates that remain hidden deep within in the Earth's mantle. Scientists at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and the British Columbia Geological Survey used earthquake shockwaves, or seismic tomography, to create a three-dimensional map of these massive plate...
  • Meet 'Amasia,' the Next Supercontinent

    02/09/2012 9:45:24 AM PST · by LibWhacker · 29 replies · 1+ views
    Science ^ | 2/8/12 | Sid Perkins
    No boats required. In the distant future, most if not all of today's continents (brown fragments, depicted with current-day outlines) will assemble into a single landmass called Amasia (shown approximately 100 million years from now). Over the next few hundred million years, the Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea will disappear, and Asia will crash into the Americas forming a supercontinent that will stretch across much of the Northern Hemisphere. That's the conclusion of a new analysis of the movements of these giant landmasses. Unlike in today's world, where a variety of tectonic plates move across Earth's surface carrying the...
  • A Collision in Space 466 Million Years Ago Is Still Hurling Asteroids at Earth

    07/05/2018 9:49:34 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 35 replies
    ScienceAlert ^ | January 26, 2017 | Josh Hrala
    Astronomers have found that the majority of meteorites that regularly fall into Earth's atmosphere today are the result of an asteroid collision that took place 466 million years ago. Using chemical analysis from rock samples around the world, the team discovered that before that colossal collision, Earth experienced impacts from many different types of meteorite, meaning that our planet's history with meteorites is far more complex than we thought. After examining the chemical makeup of these chrome-spinels, the team found that 34 percent of the pre-collision micrometeorites were primitive achondrites, a type of meteorite that only makes up 0.45 percent...
  • Space stunner: Moon is shrinking, shocking study reveals

    05/13/2019 1:30:22 PM PDT · by Candor7 · 48 replies
    Fox News ^ | 13 May 2019 | Chris Ciaccia
    Somebody alert Jeff Bezos: the Moon is shrinking. According to a new research study, the Moon may be shrinking as it experiences lunar quakes, known as "moonquakes." Researchers analyzed 28 moonquakes from 1969 to 1977 and came up with the startling observation that eight of the quakes came from "true tectonic activity — the movement of crustal plates," as opposed to impacts from asteroids or rumblings inside the celestial satellite. “We found that a number of the quakes recorded in the Apollo data happened very close to the faults seen in the [NASA’s Apollo and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions] LRO...
  • Earth-Shattering Theory:FINALLY, THE DETAILS FOR FORMING THE MOON WORK OUT

    10/11/2001 6:53:58 AM PDT · by callisto · 18 replies · 1+ views
    Scientific American ^ | Nov. 1, 2001 edition | GEORGE MUSSER
    If you ever find yourself at a cocktail party of astrophysicists and don't know what to say, try this: "But what about the angular momentum?" No matter what the topic of conversation, you'll be guaranteed to sound erudite. Nearly every field of astronomy, from galaxy formation to star formation, has an "angular momentum problem." Nothing in the cosmos ever seems to spin or orbit at the rate it should. The moon is no exception. It is the flywheel to end all flywheels; if its orbital angular momentum were transferred to Earth's axial rotation, our planet would come close to spinning ...
  • Quake split a tectonic plate in two, and geologists are shaken

    10/29/2018 3:08:28 PM PDT · by ETL · 21 replies
    National Geographic ^ | Oct 24, 2018 | Robin George Andrews
    An intense temblor in Mexico was just the latest example of an enigmatic type of earthquake with highly destructive potential On September 7, 2017, a magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck southern Mexico, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. While earthquakes are common enough in the region, this powerful event wasn’t any run-of-the-mill tremor. That’s because part of the roughly 37-mile-thick tectonic plate responsible for the quake completely split apart, as revealed by a new study in Nature Geoscience. This event took place in a matter of tens of seconds, and it coincided with a gargantuan release of energy. “If you think of...
  • The Moon's equatorial bulge hints at Earth's early conditions

    02/15/2018 9:44:00 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 19 replies
    Astronomy ^ | Tuesday, February 13, 2018 | Amber Jorgenson
    Over two centuries ago, Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French physicist and mathematician, noticed that the Moon's equatorial bulge is about 20 times larger than expected. Now, researchers are trying to find out why. Although the Moon looks quite spherical from the ground, it is flatter at its poles and wider at its equator, a trait known as an equatorial bulge. This characteristic is common; it's usually caused by an object's rotation around its axis. However, it's been noted that the Moon's bulge is about 20 times larger than it should be given its rotational rate of once per month... researchers at...
  • Free-floating planets in the Milky Way outnumber stars by factors of thousands

    05/10/2012 10:10:10 AM PDT · by LibWhacker · 103 replies
    Springer ^ | 5/10/12
    Researchers say life-bearing planets may exist in vast numbers in the space between stars in the Milky WayA few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, UK. Their findings are published online in the Springer journal Astrophysics and Space Science. The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang, and that...
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Evolution of the Moon [ video ]

    03/20/2012 8:25:49 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 10 replies
    NASA ^ | March 20, 2012 | (see photo credit)
    Explanation: What is the history of the Moon? The Moon was likely created from debris expelled when a Mars-sized object violently impacted the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. Just after gravitationally condensing, as imagined above, the glowing-hot surface of the Moon cooled and cracked. Rocks large and small continued to impact the surface, including a particularly large impact that created Aitken Basin about 4.3 billion years ago. A Heavy Bombardment period then continued for hundreds of millions of years, creating large basins all over the lunar surface. Over the next few billion years lava flowed into Earth-side basins, eventually...
  • Earth and Venus are the Same Size, so Why Doesn’t Venus Have a Magnetosphere?....

    12/12/2017 10:53:55 AM PST · by BenLurkin · 54 replies
    universetoday.com ^ | universetoday.com | Matt Williams
    According to a new study conducted by an international team of scientists, it may have something to do with a massive impact that occurred in the past. Since Venus appears to have never suffered such an impact, its never developed the dynamo needed to generate a magnetic field. ... According to the most widely-accepted models of planet formation, terrestrial planets are not formed in a single stage, but from a series of accretion events characterized by collisions with planetesimals and planetary embryos – most of which have cores of their own. Recent studies on high-pressure mineral physics and on orbital...
  • Heavenly Bodies Stir Up Routine Catastrophes

    03/18/2003 9:33:33 AM PST · by blam · 11 replies · 842+ views
    IOL ^ | 3-18-2003 | Graeme Addison
    Heavenly bodies stir up routine catastrophes March 18 2003 at 01:30PM By Graeme Addison Legend has it that when two people get together and er... bond, the Earth will move – at least in a metaphorical sense. Likewise, it takes two heavenly bodies, an impactor and a target, to come together with Earth-shattering force to form a crater. There’s nothing dreamlike about this: it happens, frequently, throughout the solar system. Impact catastrophes are routine. Just over two-billion years ago, a chunk of asteroid at least the size of Table Mountain struck the landmass that is now South Africa. It hurtled...
  • Solar System Ice: Source of Earth's Water

    07/14/2012 6:12:51 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 19 replies
    Carnegie Institution ^ | Thursday, July 12, 2012 | unattributed
    Scientists have long believed that comets and, or a type of very primitive meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites were the sources of early Earth's volatile elements -- which include hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon -- and possibly organic material, too. Understanding where these volatiles came from is crucial for determining the origins of both water and life on the planet. New research led by Carnegie's Conel Alexander focuses on frozen water that was distributed throughout much of the early Solar System, but probably not in the materials that aggregated to initially form Earth... It has been suggested that both comets and carbonaceous...
  • Large Meteorite Impacts and Planetary Evolution V

    01/10/2016 4:36:03 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 20 replies
    EurekAlert! ^ | January 8, 2016 | Geological Society of America
    Impact cratering is one of the most fundamental geological processes. On many planets, impact craters are the dominant geological landform. On Earth, erosion, plate tectonics, and volcanic resurfacing continually destroy the impact cratering record, but even here, the geological, biological, and environmental effects of impact cratering are apparent. Impact events are destructive and have been linked to at least one of the 'big five' mass extinctions over the past 540 million years. Intriguingly, impact craters can also have beneficial effects. Many impact craters are associated with economic metalliferous ore deposits and hydrocarbon reservoirs. This Special Paper from The Geological...
  • Source of Moon's Magnetism Found

    01/15/2009 8:15:48 PM PST · by Gordon Greene · 46 replies · 1,170+ views
    Yahoo.com ^ | 01-15-2009 | SPACE.com Staff
    Moon rocks delivered to Earth by Apollo astronauts held a mystery that has plagued scientists since the 1970s: Why were the lunar rocks magnetic? Earth's rotating, iron core produces the planet's magnetic field. But the moon does not have such a setup. Now, scientists at MIT think they have a solution. Some 4.2 billion years ago, the moon had a liquid core with a dynamo (like Earth's core today) that produced a strong magnetic field. The moon's magnetic field would have been about 1-50th as strong as Earth's is today, the researchers say. The MIT team found evidence for the...
  • Astrobiology Top 10: Earth's Moon May Not Be Critical to Life

    12/25/2015 12:03:24 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 45 replies
    Astrobiology ^ | Wednesday, December 23, 2015 | Keith Cooper
    In 1993, French astronomer Jacques Laskar ran a series of calculations indicating that the gravity of the Moon is vital to stabilizing the tilt of our planet. Earth's obliquity, as this tilt is technically known as, has huge repercussions for climate. Laskar argued that should Earth's obliquity wander over hundreds of thousands of years, it would cause environmental chaos by creating a climate too variable for complex life to develop in relative peace. So his argument goes, we should feel remarkably lucky to have such a large moon on our doorstep, as no other terrestrial planet in our solar system...
  • Comet or Meteorite Impact Events in 1178AD?

    01/03/2005 3:59:02 PM PST · by blam · 67 replies · 5,613+ views
    SIS Conference ^ | 1-26-2003 | Emilio Spedicato
    1. Introduction As related by Clube and Napier in their monograph The Cosmic Winter, see [1], in the year 1178 A.D. four wise men of Canterbury were sitting outside on a clear and calm 18th June night, a half Moon standing placidly in the starry sky. Suddenly they noticed a flame jutting out of a horn of the Moon. Then they saw the Moon tremble and its colour change slowly from light brilliant to a darker reddish tone. Such a colour remained for all the time the Moon was visible during that phase. This story is found in a manuscript...
  • Crystal is 'oldest scrap of Earth crust'

    02/24/2014 7:56:24 AM PST · by JoeProBono · 51 replies
    bbc ^ | 24 February 2014
    A tiny 4.4-billion-year-old crystal has been confirmed as the oldest fragment of Earth's crust. The zircon was found in sandstone in the Jack Hills region of Western Australia. Scientists dated the crystal by studying its uranium and lead atoms. The former decays into the latter very slowly over time and can be used like a clock. The finding has been reported in the journal Nature Geoscience. Its implication is that Earth had formed a solid crust much sooner after its formation 4.6 billion years ago than was previously thought, and very quickly following the great collision with a Mars-sized body...