Impacts drive lunar rockfalls over billions of years

Valentin Tertius Bickel (), Jordan Aaron, Andrea Manconi, Simon Loew and Urs Mall
Additional contact information
Valentin Tertius Bickel: Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research
Jordan Aaron: ETH Zurich
Andrea Manconi: ETH Zurich
Simon Loew: ETH Zurich
Urs Mall: Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Past exploration missions have revealed that the lunar topography is eroded through mass wasting processes such as rockfalls and other types of landslides, similar to Earth. We have analyzed an archive of more than 2 million high-resolution images using an AI and big data-driven approach and created the first global map of 136.610 lunar rockfall events. Using this map, we show that mass wasting is primarily driven by impacts and impact-induced fracture networks. We further identify a large number of currently unknown rockfall clusters, potentially revealing regions of recent seismic activity. Our observations show that the oldest, pre-Nectarian topography still hosts rockfalls, indicating that its erosion has been active throughout the late Copernican age and likely continues today. Our findings have important implications for the estimation of the Moon’s erosional state and other airless bodies as well as for the understanding of the topographic evolution of planetary surfaces in general.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16653-3 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-16653-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16653-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().