Posted on

One of the Moon’s most prominent features is older than we thought

Featured image: the Moon by Pedro Lastra on Unsplash

Paper: Černok, A., White, L.F., Anand, M. et al. Lunar samples record an impact 4.2 billion years ago that may have formed the Serenitatis Basin. Commun Earth Environ 2, 120 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00181-z

About 4 billion years ago, the inner Solar System fell prey to an apocalyptic assault by asteroids. These asteroids slammed into the terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars—and the Moon, leaving behind the scars and basins that make up the planets’ landscapes today. This attack, called the Large Heavy Bombardment, helps explain the genesis of a majority of the formations decorating the inner planets of the Solar System. Previous dating of Moon rocks helped pindown the occurrence of the Bombardment somewhere around 3.8 billion years ago. While this window of time is widely accepted in the planetary science community, one of the Moon’s most iconic features, the Serinatits Basin, might poke a hole in it.

Continue reading “One of the Moon’s most prominent features is older than we thought”
Posted on

Tiny Crystals, Big Story: Time capsules from the Early Mars

Featured Image: Zircon grain under the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). Image used with permission from Wikipedia (Emmanuel Roquette).

Article: The internal structure and geodynamics of Mars inferred from a 4.2-Gyr zircon record.

Authors: Maria M. Costa, Ninna K. Jensen, Laura C. Bouvier, James N. Connelly, Takashi Mikouchi, Matthew S. A. Horstwood, Jussi-Petteri Suuronen, Frédéric Moynier, Zhengbin Deng, Arnaud Agranier, Laure A. J. Martin, Tim E. Johnson, Alexander A. Nemchin, and Martin Bizzarro

While sitting in Geology 101 studying the geological time scale, most of us have gone through this experience where we imagined ourselves going back in time; visualizing mammoths passing by, dinosaurs hunting and fighting. But all these pictures start to become hazy and unclear when we reach close to 4 billion years. It is the time for which we have no rock records, and this is where zircons or what I would like to call “tiny survivors” comes in.

Continue reading “Tiny Crystals, Big Story: Time capsules from the Early Mars”
Posted on

When Lightning Strikes! Fulgurite Formation and Earth’s Weather

Paper: Lightning-induced weathering of Cascadian volcanic peaks


Authors: Jonathan M. Castro, Franziska Keller, Yves Feisel, Pierre Lanari, Christoph Helo, Sebastian P. Mueller, C. Ian Schipper, Chad Thomas

The bright flashes followed by the loud thunderclaps of large storms are inherently transient, but a recent study by Castro et al proposes a new approach to investigating the history of storm activity and extreme weather events on Earth: through fossilized lightning strikes, or fulgurites.

Continue reading “When Lightning Strikes! Fulgurite Formation and Earth’s Weather”