Our Moon Refuses to Obey Scientists

The neat theories for the origin of the moon and its subsequent evolution unravel when you try to stuff long ages into a young body.

Forget what the textbooks and documentaries on TV say about how our moon became what it is today. The theories don’t work. Scientists are confused. The moon was supposed to have formed from a giant impact billions of years ago, then after some hot lava eruptions, it should have settled down into a cold, dead ball. Peter Schultz of Brown University summarizes the current feeling when he says, “There’s this assumption that the moon is long dead, but we keep finding that that’s not the case.”

Here are some recent articles about the moon, with “surprise effects” quoted.

The moon isn’t ‘dead’: Ridges on lunar surface show signs of recent tectonic activity (Space.com, 4 May 2020). Ridges observed with little regolith on top cannot be explained by ancient volcanism. “Newly discovered ridges on the moon’s surface are leading scientists to think that the moon might have an active tectonic system.” Five times the article says that active tectonic movements could still be occurring today.

“There’s this assumption that the moon is long dead, but we keep finding that that’s not the case,” Shultz said in the same statement. “From this paper, it appears that the moon may still be creaking and cracking — potentially in the present day — and we can see the evidence on these ridges.“

The moon is emitting carbon, raising questions about how it was formed (New Scientist, 6 May 2020). Volatile elements containing carbon were supposed to be long gone by now, this article says, but there’s more present than can be accumulated from known sources.

The researchers compared the moon’s carbon emissions with estimates of the carbon supplied by two external sources – the solar wind, and collisions with micrometeoroids – and found they didn’t match up. “The emission is a bit larger than the supply from outer space,” says Yokota, which is why the team believes the moon has its own carbon supply.

To rescue the Giant Impact theory, the scientists are having to imagine special conditions.

This lack of volatiles is crucial to the widely held hypothesis that the moon formed as a result of a giant impact between a young Earth and a Mars-sized body, resulting in high temperatures that would have boiled the volatiles away.  

But the discovery that volatile carbon is still present on the moon suggests there were milder temperatures when it formed. “We expect a kind of modification of the lunar birth model,” says Yokota.

New evidence shows giant meteorite impacts formed parts of the Moon’s crust (Phys.org 11 May 2020, from the Royal Ontario Museum). The idea that additional impacts mixed up the material in the lunar crust sounds like special pleading. Tiny grains from Apollo 17 samples show crystals that only could have formed at very high temperatures:

The scientists conducted new research of a unique rock collected by NASA astronauts during the 1972 Apollo 17 mission to the Moon. They found it contains mineralogical evidence that it formed at incredibly high temperatures (in excess of 2300 °C/ 4300 °F) that can only be achieved by the melting of the outer layer of a planet in a large impact event.

And so this team contradicts the prior team that imagined “milder temperatures” when it formed. The Royal Ontario scientists performed divination on crystals to visualize a storm of impacts mixing the crustal rocks.

“By first looking at this rock, I was amazed by how differently the minerals look compared to other Apollo 17 samples,” says Dr. Ana Cernok, Hatch Postdoctoral Fellow at the ROM and co-author of the study. “Although smaller than a millimetre, the baddeleyite grain that caught our attention was the largest one I have ever seen in Apollo samples. This small grain is still holding the evidence for formation of an impact basin that was hundreds of kilometres in diameter. This is significant, because we do not see any evidence of these old impacts on Earth.”

Radar Points to Moon Being More Metallic Than Researchers Thought (NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, 1 July 2020). Planetary scientists believe that the bulk composition of the Earth and Moon are largely similar, but higher levels of titanium and iron than expected have been found in the largest craters near the poles. That doesn’t fit the favored theory of a giant impact. Now they don’t know if the Earth contributed those metals or the impactor did – or, maybe neither did.

• “The LRO mission and its radar instrument continue to surprise us with new insights about the origins and complexity of our nearest neighbor,” a lead LRO scientist says.
• “It was a surprising relationship that we had no reason to believe would exist,” another said of the dielectric constant that increased with crater diameter, but then leveled off.
• “This exciting result from Mini-RF shows that even after 11 years in operation at the Moon, we are still making new discoveries about the ancient history of our nearest neighbor,” another LRO scientist named Noah comments.
• “It really raises the question of what this means for our previous formation hypotheses,” another says.

Scientists provide new explanation for the strange asymmetry of the moon (Tokyo Institute of Technology via Phys.org, 22 June 2020). When textbooks and TV programs make it sound like the moon is all figured out, quote the first sentence of this article: “The Earth‐moon system’s history remains mysterious.” That’s 51 years after Apollo 11. Look at the difference between belief and evidence:

The Earth‐moon system’s history remains mysterious. Scientists believe the system formed when a Mars‐sized body collided with the proto‐Earth. Earth ended up being the larger daughter of this collision and retained enough heat to become tectonically active. The moon, being smaller, likely cooled down faster and geologically froze. The apparent early dynamism of the moon challenges this idea.

Why did the moon show significant activity up to a billion Darwin Years ago? That is “much later than expected,” they admit. For theory rescue, the Japanese turned to their computers to model different scenarios. What they came up with is kind of KREEPy (see article).

Geology of Grimaldi Basin on the Moon: Evidence for volcanism and tectonism during the Copernican period (Singh and Srivastava, Icarus 27 June 2020). The Grimaldi Basin, a large ringed impact site, ends up having very recent activity, too. Anybody want to trust their dating skills, considering how wrong planetary scientists have been before?

Cross-cutting of small Copernican craters by fresh wrinkle ridges and lobate scarps has been observed at several places in the basin suggesting that tectonic activities occurred in the basin within the past ~50 Ma-1 Ga. [50 million to one billion years ago]. Thus, similar to the Oceanus Procellarum region, Grimaldi Basin was also geologically active during the Copernican period.

This should be surprising, because the moon does not have plate tectonics. The only tectonic activity had to include stretching or shrinking. The young basalts, furthermore, are high in iron and titanium. “Very recent tectonic activities also occurred inside the Grimaldi Bain [sic].”

There’s this assumption that the moon is long dead, but we keep finding that that’s not the case.

Vertical angular momentum constraint on lunar formation and orbital history (ZhenLiang Tian and Jack Wisdom, PNAS, 7 July 2020). These two have bad news for Giant Impact models. The impactor could not have come in at a high angle, as one popular model proposed.

There are various scenarios for the formation of the Moon and subsequent dynamical evolution of the Earth–Moon system, all of which are subject to a constraint that has not previously been fully exploited. Using this constraint, we demonstrate that the recently proposed high-obliquity scenario is not consistent with the present Earth–Moon system. This constraint will have to be taken into account in all future investigations of the formation and evolution of the Moon.

A long-lived magma ocean on a young Moon (Maurice and four others, Science Advances, 10 July 2020). After asserting the standard Giant Impact model in the Abstract, this paper presents problems: a “long-lived magma ocean” on a “young moon.” But this is how secular scientists talk about long-ago events that nobody witnessed: bluffing certitude followed by admission of poor evidence.

A giant impact onto Earth led to the formation of the Moon, resulted in a lunar magma ocean (LMO), and initiated the last event of core segregation on Earth. However, the timing and temporal link of these events remain uncertain.

Want to see some of the uncertainty? In the paper, they say,

The LMO solidification time scale of up to ~200 Ma inferred from our model seems inconsistent with the chronology of LMO products. Crystallization ages for ferroan anorthosites (FANs), representing the LMO’s flotation crust, range from ~100 to ~200 Ma after the beginning of the solar system. However, this range may not reflect true differences in formation ages, because some of these ages have large uncertainties and different chronometers have not yielded concordant results.

And yet they end up claiming that all the data converge on the consensus age of 4.4 billion years for the moon! Can anybody believe these guys? They pick and choose the evidences that give them the result they already believed in. That is not good science. What about the evidences shown above for recent tectonic activity and carbon emissions going on today? And yet today, all the popular science news sites like Phys.org are parroting their press release that the moon is “younger than thought” by (wow) 4.425 billion years instead of 4.51 billion years – as if it is even scientifically possible to calculate such a thing to four significant figures. What chutzpah!

Small craters population as a useful geological investigative tool: Apollo 17 region as a case study (Bugiolacchi and Wohler for Icarus for Nov 2020 issue). Some scientists still haven’t given up on crater count dating, in spite of its numerous unverifiable assumptions and problems (19 Jan 2019, 30 Oct 2018). This duo counted craters in the 7 to 50 meter diameter size, and concluded that “applying standard Absolute Model Ages fits to small craters size-frequency distributions to estimate resurfacing ages will only work for surfaces no older than a few tens of Ma.” Even if their estimates were sound, that is only the most recent 5-10% of the assumed age of the moon.

Are you noticing the difference between bluffing and empiricism? Secular scientists sound so cocksure of themselves, but turn right around and admit that ancient imagined events are “poorly understood.” One way to read secular science papers is to look for the surprises and things that were unexpected. The authors may say they are “excited” by the discoveries, but this is like being excited that you have job security even though you failed. Unlike other science news sites, here at CEH we give you enough detail and links to the original sources so that you can discern the difference between actual evidence and what David Klinghoffer calls the “PR team of Chutzpah, Cheek, and Insolence” employed by Darwinists and secularists (Evolution News).

For relief, listen to the stirring Apollo March by David Coppedge, premiered last year by the US Air Force Band of the Golden West at the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11. The music is set to artwork by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean.

Much of the delightful theory-demolishing “ground truth” evidence that continues to confound evolutionary theories was brought home by these 12 brave men, the first humans to set foot on another celestial body.