Chips Off an Old Lava Flow

Mathematics – Logic

Scientific paper

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Moon, Lunar, Meteorite, Kalahari 009, Cryptomare, Cryptomaria, Dark-Halo, Breccia, Lunar Basalt, Lunar Volcanism

Scientific paper

Photogeologic and remote sensing studies of the Moon show that many light-colored, smooth areas in the highlands contain craters surrounded by dark piles of excavated debris. The dark deposits resemble the dark basalts that make up the lunar maria. They contain the same diagnostic minerals (especially high-calcium pyroxene) and chemical compositions (high iron oxide) as do mare basalts. The deposits formed when vast amounts of material ejected during the formation of giant impact basins covered pre-existing lava plains. Since the smooth plains are older than the youngest impact basin (about 3.8 billion years old), the lavas must have erupted before formation of the visible maria. In fact, they were visible maria for a while eons ago, but were buried by ejecta when the basins formed.
We have samples of these ancient mare basalts. They reside in breccias collected from the lunar highlands. Age dating indicates that the chips have ages of 3.9 billion years and older. The oldest dated mare basalt in the Apollo collection is 4.23 billion years. Now Kentaro Terada (Hiroshima University, Japan), Mahesh Anand (Open University, UK), Anna Sokol and Addi Bischoff (Institute for Planetology, Muenster, Germany), and Yuji Sano (The University of Tokyo, Japan) have determined the age of pieces of an ancient lava flow in a lunar meteorite, Kalahari 009, found in Botswana in 1999. The team dated this very low-titanium mare basalt by using an ion microprobe to measure the isotopic composition of lead and uranium in phosphate minerals. They found that the basalt fragments in the rock have an age of about 4.35 (plus or minus 0.15) billion years. This overlaps with the ages of chemically-distinct igneous rocks from the highlands, indicating that diverse magmas were being produced early in the history of the Moon.

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