China’s Chang’e 5 spacecraft brings back evidence that the Moon “came alive” 123 million years ago.
The Moon was once thought to be a silent, lifeless rock since 2 billion years ago. However, the soil samples brought back by the Chang’e 5 spacecraft tell a surprising story.
According to Sci-News, Dr. Qiuli Li and colleagues from the Institute of Geochemistry and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed about 3,000 glass grains from these soil samples.
The reason these grains are of interest is that they are likely volcanic glass, which reveals information about the period when Earth’s satellite still exhibited geological activity.
Graphic depicting volcanic activity releasing small glass beads on the Moon – (Photo: T. Zhang & Y. Wang).
Surprisingly, they identified 3 grains among them that originated from volcanic activity just 123 million years ago, using uranium-lead dating methods.
Previously, analyses of other samples collected from NASA’s Apollo 16 mission, the Soviet Union’s Luna 1, and Chang’e 5 itself led scientists to believe that the Moon had extensive volcanic activity, but only from 4.4 to 2 billion years ago.
The new findings prove that volcanic activity lasted much longer than previously suspected, at least on a smaller and more localized scale.
The recently discovered volcanic grains contain high levels of potassium, phosphorus, and rare earth elements referred to as KREEP elements, which can produce heat through radioactivity.
This localized heating caused by KREEP elements could melt rocks in the Moon’s mantle, resulting in small amounts of magma erupting to the surface.
This also suggests a localized enrichment of heat-producing elements in the mantle of the celestial body.
This study, recently published in the journal Science, once again supports the skepticism that our Moon is not a “dead” rock.
Moreover, some earlier studies indicated that there might still be a small window for life to have existed in this barren world—potentially twice in the past—even though it has since gone extinct.
On Earth, geological activity plays a crucial role in creating an environment suitable for life.
Most importantly, the presence of something still hot and active inside the Moon also raises hopes of finding pockets of liquid water somewhere on this celestial body, which would be a fantastic resource for the lunar bases that many space agencies around the world are planning.
