The Moon Is Not What You Think

What if I told you that engraved into the lunar surface is a historical record that could provide critical insight into the history of our own planet? Carved deep into the lunar surface are many stories. Stories, if they had occurred on Earth, would have been washed away by geological forces. But the moon is a Rosetta stone and timelessly holds the evidence of something beautiful, awesome, and even sinister. Today, we'll be exploring recent discoveries on the moon, their secrets and revelations now imparted to mankind, and perhaps some crucial lessons learned here today on Squaring the Circle.

[Music] Greetings. I'm Randall Carlson and this is my podcast, Squaring the Circle. Today I will be joined by my friend, colleague, and ally, John Arthur. And welcome to the stage, John.

Glad to be here, sir.

Glad to have you. So, John, I just recently spent virtually a whole week with you and you with me, and, uh, held what group of what about 40 other people, I think.

Yes, sir. I think it was 38.

38. Did that include the staff? I'm not sure. It was right around there.

Okay. So, what were we doing?

Well, we were touring, uh, the Lake Bonavville flood plain.

Uh-huh.

We started in Salt Lake City. We had some tour buses, uh, and a group of really fun, interesting people that, uh, many of who were old friends from previous events and tours that we've done. And we started in Salt Lake City and we drove north through Red Rock Pass out onto the Snake River plain. We diverted to the northeast and we visited the ruins of the, uh, Teton Dam disaster, which was very interesting and informative in multiple ways.

I found... Did you find that?

Well, for me it was the highlight of the trip. We had a wonderful lady from the local museum come out and she gave us a great, uh, dissertation on the, the building of the Teton Dam. But, uh, that was interesting, and then also just the fallout from it, and very enlightening in, in the thought process of understanding the Bonavville flood.

Yes, it was. I even though it was an epic flood, a huge flood in its own right, it was still minuscule compared to the, the ancient flood whose evidence we were following in the landscape. And I will mention that we got enough documentation and data that we, we will be doing a presentation and telling that story. It's a, it's a really valuable important story, uh, what happened, uh, because that was the last monumental dam, uh, project in America undertaken by the Bureau of Reclamation, and there's a story that needs to be told there with multiple lessons that we can extract from it. So that will be coming up in the near future. We will get together and we, we will tell that story about the Teton Dam disaster. Uh, and then from there we followed the route of the Snake River, which was the pathway of the great Bonavville flood, and we saw some amazing landscapes. I think you would agree.

Absolutely. It was gorgeous. Couldn't put the camera in an ugly position, right? Or in a position that didn't have a hell of a story to tell.

Yeah. Think about Massacre Rocks. My gosh, you know, when you're standing there, or, or Swan Falls Boulder Bar, or the, the canyon there at Shoshone Falls, I mean, there was no Bruno Canyon. I mean, the list goes on. These were epic events that left a lasting imprint into the landscape of the western United States. And, um, I think everybody who was on that tour came away with their eyes opened to some of the incredible events, uh, mind-blowing events that have transpired in our own backyard. You know, at this point, I've spent many weeks, months traversing these landscapes that could only be created under conditions vastly different than what prevails there now in the present. It raises questions, and those questions haven't been answered. Uh, so we're faced with the idea that, um, you know, there have been these tremendous outsized events that have occurred on this planet. And that, coupled with the idea that we now know that life has been profoundly affected by catastrophic events. Mass extinction events have been... Not some, well, even the term "mass extinction" is relatively new in the lexicon. Once upon a time it was just extinctions, because extinctions were considered to be long, slow, drawn-out, incremental things, and as fast as species were going extinct, they're being replaced. Right? Well, that model of life history on Earth is completely obsolete. We now know there are these epic mass extinction events that might eliminate half, three-quarters, or even 90% of all species on Earth, both terrestrial and marine. Well, the thing now, I think, that that we're, we're moving towards is that same model applied to human civilization, that we have to look at mass extinction events relative to human civilizations that have risen and then abruptly fallen for no obvious reason other than the fact that perhaps you had cultural groups that were not adaptable, not prepared for natural changes in the environment and the climate that basically pulled the rug out from under their efforts. So I think this is one of the most important insights, uh, as an evolving civilization on earth that we can have, is the realization that there have been these gigantic outsized events, sometimes over vast areas of the earth's surface, large regional events, continental events, and even global events, right? Which leads us to, I think, some of the implications of what I call the new catastrophism. And one of the things I'd like to quote here is from a, an interesting paper that came out. No, gosh, when was it? Um, I think it was, uh, 2020. Uh, I'll, I'll get the, the, the origin of this, uh, in a second here. But, but let me quote from this paper. It was called... It was by William E. Burroughs, published December 14, 2020. Title of the paper is this: "The Big One's Coming. If We Don't Want to Go the Way of the Dinosaur, It's Time to Colonize the Moon." Which I think brings us back to the discussion we had in the previous episode of Squaring the Circle. We're talking about finally, now, humankind is getting motivated and inspired to return to the moon.

Okay. Now, this interesting story, and I will provide the, the source for this so people can go in and read the whole thing for themselves, because it's quite interesting, but starts by quoting, uh, from a novel called "Encounter with Tyber." So that apparently would, maybe is a reference to Rome maybe, which was founded by Romulus and Remus on the river Tiber. Um, so there was an epic novel written by Buzz Aldrin and, who was an astronaut, and John Barnes, and in this novel, they... The story revolves around an inter... a multi-generational intergalactic spaceship. And, uh, so there's a conversation going on between the commander called OEP... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... Ozapac, or O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... O... Ozapac, I believe. I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but, um, she was the commander of this multigenerational intergalactic spaceship. And here's the quote: "There's not a place in the universe that's safe forever. The universe is telling us: spread out, or wait around and die." End of quote. Then goes on to say, "Astronomers and scientists around the world who have studied the solar system and beyond have seen damage to every solid body they scrutinized and know that the universe is as abidingly dangerous as it is beautiful." As Galileo observed in the year 1610, when he trained, uh, his primitive telescope on the moon and saw impact craters—and I'll mention millions—we now know there's millions of impact craters on the moon. Solar system exploration has borne out what astronomers have seen. Voyager 2, the first interplanetary spacecraft to scrutinize the four major planets beyond Mars on its aptly named 12-year grand tour, sent imagery home that not only provided scientists with a virtual library of information on the planets, but that—like its Pioneer 10 and 11 predecessors—showed the Jovian moons to be heavily cratered by impacts made by very large rocks moving at terrific speed. He then goes on to talk about one of my heroes, the late Gene Shoemaker, who was, uh, instrumental, with his wife Carolyn and David Levy, in the discovery of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which we witnessed impacting Jupiter back in July of, of, of 1994. I think one of the most important astronomical events of the 20th century, because it really did alert the human species that yes, giant impacts occur on planets. We're witnessing one, right? But not just one, we witnessed 21 of them. And I think that opened the door to something I had already suspected by then, which was that multiple impacts were far more common than we had imagined.

So, uh, this, this, uh, "The Big One's Coming" paper goes on to talk about Gene Shoemaker, who was actually killed in the outback of Australia, uh, going to, uh, research a crater that now bears his name, Shoemaker, uh, in, in, um... And while I'm reading this, you might pull up, uh, an image, if you will, of Shoemaker Crater. So, Gene Shoemaker was a planetary geologist, and he said that the next time a really big asteroid or comet crashes into Earth, it could cause an explosion equivalent to all the world's nuclear weapons going off at the same time. It could cause mass extermination. Now, while that's absolutely true, it's also true that a much smaller impact, or maybe even a multiple impact event that did not carry nearly the energy, let's say, as the dinosaur killer, maybe wouldn't cause a mass extinction that would show up in the geological or paleontological record millions of years from now, but it could certainly cause a civilizational or cultural mass extinction. Ask any dinosaur what that's like.

Now, here... here's the point I want to stress. What is the probability of a dinosaur-scale impact occurring? They're very... in any time in the next few centuries. Well, they're very low, but a much higher probability would be a much smaller event that maybe, like I said, would not cause a mass extinction on the scale of the, the Great Five—which is something we actually need to dive into at some point, talking about those—but could certainly cause the collapse of civilization, and not the extermination of the human species, but the, the, uh, the retrogression of the human species back to a stone age existence, because our technological civilization is actually far more vulnerable than people realize, and, uh, even a small cosmic event could cause serious disruption.

Here we go. The Shoemaker impact structure lies in the arid central part of Western Australia, near Wuna. The crater is about 30 kilometers, or 18 miles, in diameter and contains seasonal lakes. Yeah, we see some of those seasonal lakes there. So, they... he was on his way to explore. He was exploring this and documenting this crater when he was killed, apparently in a very, uh, uh, freak accident. I mean, you're out in the back, in, in the, in the Australian back country, where you presumably are not encountering heavy traffic, and there was some kind of a, a crash, I think, in his, uh... You might look up Gene Shoemaker and might tell us about his, um, his demise. I want people to know about Gene, because he was heroic. He was the one that trained... uh, he was primarily, uh, the one who was in charge of training the Apollo astronauts and teaching them. Uh, and some of the sites that I've been to were sites that NASA used to train astronauts to understand impact phenomena on the moon. Um, so, he, he passed away in a head-on car collision on the remote Tanami Track, a few hundred kilometers northwest of Alice Springs, Australia. His wife, uh, Carolyn was severely injured in the crash. In '99, some of his ashes were carried to the moon by the Lunar Prospector space probe in a capsule designed by Carolyn, uh, Porco.

Oh, wow.

Okay. See, I'd forgotten that. I remember now, but I had completely forgotten that that... yes, some of his ashes were carried to the moon.

And then what, what happened to him?

So that they were put on the Barringer Meteor Crater. And a quotation from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was inscribed there: "And when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars. And he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun."

Wow.

So that was Gene. And, um, you know, when I, uh, worked on the, uh, "Fire from the Sky" back in '96, we... one of, one of my regrets was that we did interview Gene Shoemaker, but I was not able to be present at that interview. But he was interviewed at my recommendation. Uh, and, uh, so that, that was a disappointment of, of mine, and I always thought I would get the chance to, to meet him, until, of course, freak out. I mean, who would think you're going to get in a head-on collision out in the middle of the Australian outback, like it said, remote.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, so anyways, in the paper by William Burroughs, he goes on to say, after, um, referencing the dinosaur extinction, "You ask any dinosaur what that's like," he then says, "It is therefore imperative that we adopt a dual strategy for survival. Start an active planetary defense system that can spot potential impactors close in and divert or destroy them, and establish colonies on other worlds, starting with the moon, to spread out rather than die." I will also mention that there's another option there. He says that we can spot potential impactors close in and divert or destroy. On the other hand, those impactors, bear in mind, the, the, the more dangerous they are, the closer they are coming to the earth. But the closer they are to the Earth, the more accessible they're going to be. And so I want to see, within a generation, I want to see, uh, I want to see asteroid mining, uh, getting underway, whether with humans in space or robotic. Maybe it could happen all robotically. I think that a lot of it could, but I think that a human presence, um, is still going to be necessary. But I believe that that's something that needs to happen sooner rather than later. And, of course, what we now know about the asteroids, uh, as a resource, is that pretty much everything that we're mining the earth, that we're extracting from the earth to build our industrial civilization, is available in the asteroids or the, the lunar regolith. Um, so with that in mind, there's been several interesting new developments in our studies of the moon. Um, let's get into that a little bit. Um, do we want to talk about, uh, these tremendous... Well, since we've been talking about the potential of impacts, let's look at this: the impact of, uh, one of the great impacts on the moon, which created the Shoemaker... Do you want to pull that one up again? You had...

Yes, sir. There's Shoemaker and Shoemaker. Shoemaker.

So, here's Shoemaker. Is that it? Shoemaker. Shoemaker Crater. Oh, Shoemaker Crater. Okay. I'm, I'm sorry. I was momentarily confused. I was thinking of Schrödinger Crater. Schrödinger Crater. Let me pull that one up real quick. Yeah, because that's the one that, um, that created the, uh, uh, the two valleys. The two valleys we want to talk about. If people haven't seen this already, if, if you haven't already, subscribe to my newsletter. Uh, I, I covered this in the May newsletter from this year, but let's get into it a little bit here. Um, ah, there it is. This is, uh, Schrödinger on the moon, in the southern part of the far side. Uh, and this is close to where some of the Artemis landings are supposed to take place. Several things interesting here. Notice, uh, you've got this central ring here. I don't see an uplift. Uh, but there is a... So, this was originally a multi-ring crater. Uh, see what can we find out about that crater. Let's see if, uh... Ooh, look at this. There's an oblique view. Oops. Go back to where you were. Okay. So, we can see... I believe one of the great canyons we see going off here to the, uh... Yeah, right in there. Yeah. And we're going to, we're going to be looking at that. Uh, Schrödinger. Uh, pull up the, the, the, the data on Schrödinger. Or I could do it if... Let me see here. I'll, I'll, I'll pull it up. So, there's another one. Vallis Planck extends from the crater to the upper right of center. Oh, look. Yeah, you can see it up here. See this long? Yeah. Nice and clear. Oh, yeah. Look at that. So, "Two Grand Canyon-sized valleys on the far side of the moon formed within 10 minutes." This is a headline from, uh, ABC Action News. Okay. And you can see, uh, this is Vallis Planck going up here to the left, I believe. And then Vallis, uh, Schrödinger is the one going up to the right. It's not quite as prominent, but there it is. Yeah. Yep. The impact here. And you have the two valleys get carved out. Yeah. About 3.8... eight billion years ago, two massive canyons, uh, likely formed on the moon in a span of less than 10 minutes. Less than 10 minutes. Yeah, less than 10 minutes. The extraordinary formations, each comparable in size to Earth's Grand Canyon, are hidden on the far side of the moon, the side that always faces away from Earth, 'cause it's in a, it's in a stable orbit with the, the far side always being far away, away from us.

Yes. Away from us.

So the lunar canyons are both part of the larger Schrödinger impact basin, where an object yet to be identified slammed into the moon billions of years ago. The colossal impact also led to the creation of the canyons as well, according to a new study published Tuesday. Uh, yeah, in the Journal of Nature Communications.

Mhm.

We're taking a little bit of a detour here to, uh, tell a story that I think is going to be valuable. I was coming down the stairs, and I think somebody just ahead of me had spilled a little bit. My foot hit it, slid out from under me, and I tumbled down three or four stairs to the bottom. I sure banged up my left knee. It was painful, but, uh, I was very relieved to remember that I had brought... I happened to pack my CBD from the Gods and I was really grateful that I had remembered to do that. So, I, that night I put some of the SAV on, went to bed. Though, I've, I've, you know, being in the construction and building industry, I've had many falls and, uh, injuries and stuff, and I figured I'm going to be laid up with this for a month. We drove home. I think it was 3 to 4 days later. I continued applying the SAV, and I would say within a week, I was getting around pretty good. I always bring the oil, uh, when I travel, and I'm, I'm now after this episode, I'm like, "Okay, I'm always gonna have the SAB with me, too."

Okay, so there it is. That's a nice clear image. Um, let's go to the next image here. You can see... Okay, so here you can see right down here is the South Pole. You see how close it is to the South Pole, and the impact, uh, occurred. It came... was would have been an oblique impact coming in from like this direction. If you can see my cursor, and you can see that the impact, uh, caused this massive, uh, fan to splay out. This would have been a combination of debris and, uh, magma formed in the tremendous heat generated by the impact. And right here, look at my cursor. You can see here's one of the canyons, and here's the other canyon. And you can actually follow those canyons, like in a V. And that's that point is where the first encounter would have occurred. And the object was probably moving at, you know, 30 miles per second, something like that. And so when it hit and made a massive explosion, plowed into the crust of the, of the, uh, moon, I think the E, it was, uh, estimated to be at least 15 miles deep originally. Um, and so here's an oblique view, and you can see the two canyons. Here's Planck coming out this way, long and linear. And here's, uh, Schrödinger coming off this way. You can see the arrows are pointing to the two canyons. They are larger and deeper than Grand Canyon. They're comparing in Grand Canyon, but they're actually greater in scale than Grand Canyon. Let's go to the next one here. So, here's the Grand Canyon, 1.8 kilometers deep, right? Distance along the transect. So, this is a transect, or a cross-section, of the deepest part of Grand Canyon. Okay? And 1.8... 8 km. That's about a mile, right? Um, go to the next one, and you'll see that here is Vallis Planck, 2.6 kilometers. Now, let me do a quick calculation. 2.6 times 180... even my mind. 280. So, that's 1.6 miles deep. So, that's half again more than the depth of Grand Canyon. And, uh, let's look at here. "Apparent crater floor," right? Is this prior to slumping? It was this, right? So after the, uh, after the impact, what they're calling here the "post-impact fault," you had a lot of material that slumped down into the crater, filling the bottom of it. All right? And then what they're calling the "crater breccia lens." The breccia is the fallback stuff. So you have the impact, a bunch of this stuff is blown up into the, into the sky. I won't say atmosphere, because moon doesn't have an atmosphere. And then it falls back. So you had the fallback breccia that they've cut off the bottom. So it was actually the original crater, or the original valley, was actually deeper. Then you had this slumping into it that made it even shallower, but it's still 2.6 kilometers. And, uh, let's see. I think the next one shows how it was formed. So what you had was, imagine you've got this linear chain of material being thrown out from the impact. Here comes the impact in like this at an oblique angle. Boom. It explodes. But splashed out from that point of impact are two almost trains of debris. Almost like we could imagine Shoemaker-Levy 9, and then boom, boom, boom, boom, they're hitting right after one another in a chain, or in a sequence, and that's what excavated and throughout this. So it was these secondary impacts that excavated the, the canyons. So this is, um, this is Schrödinger here, and you can see you can actually count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight impacts just in this section right here, hitting each other, just they would have been closely spaced, just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right after one another, gouging out this tremendously deep canyon. Now on Earth, all of that would have succumbed to erosion after this many, you know, after this long. But here on the, here on the moon, it's perfectly preserved.

Perfectly preserved.

Yes. And so it gives us kind of an insight as to what one of these impact events looks like. Maybe not immediately after, but we can reconstruct what, what, what it would have looked like at the time.

Correct.

Yeah. And that's why I think in the, in the opening statement, I referred to the moon as the Rosetta Stone. Because it, uh, because see, here's the thing. If, if we were to remove the geological processes on Earth, plate tectonics, uh, continental drift, subduction, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, all of these things that are constantly modifying the surface of the earth, guess what? It would look like the moon. It would look like the moon. And if anyone doubts that impacts are an ongoing process in the solar system, I mean, just go out with a pair of binoculars at night and look at the moon. Just look at the moon, and then remember that, oh yeah, there was a lot of... there was the, there was the great bombardment episode, sure, billions of years ago, but it's been ongoing since. And what is this? This was shown to us, demonstrated directly by Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994. You know, I think it was Shoemaker himself, or one, one of the, the planetary geologists that said, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event." And my response is, well, okay, but what do we mean by that? You know, yeah, nobody expected to see anything like that. It was completely unexpected. And there was a lot of astronomers that began to reconsider the impact probabilities in the, uh, aftermath, post-Shoemaker-Levy 9 reality. And you know, again, how we've got one example, and I don't know what your statistical, uh, framework would be, but what that tells me is the very real possibility that events like that are way more numerous than we had imagined, if we were to see it again, something like that again. I mean, is it going to be a million years before something like that happens again, a thousand years, a century, a decade? We don't know. We don't know.

The next graphic is really cool because it kind of shows the, uh, the scale. Uh, let's see which one was this? This was Shoemaker... I mean, Schrödinger. You can see the astronauts here standing on the rim looking into this valley that's bigger and deeper than Grand Canyon. And I sure would like to live to see the day when humans are standing on the rim of this canyon. I want to see drone footage. A drone flying up this canyon, or close, or close. I want that. And I think I would like to see millions, even billions of other of my fellow humans want that same thing, because again, the question is, what's the alternative? What is it? If, if you don't want to do this, if you don't think we should expand into the, into the cosmic frontier, what's your alternative? I'll relapse into hedonism, but that's a different topic for a different time. Relapse into hedonism.

Yeah.

I mean, it could, until of course the infrastructure of our civilization collapses in... in...

Yeah.

Yeah. But that's a different issue. That's a different issue. But it would be, uh, worth exploring. Let's talk about some of the specifics of going back to the moon. And one of the things, of course, the problem with establishing a lunar base, a colony on the moon, is the problem of radiation. And, uh, how do we solve that problem? Well, there's, there's a new discovery out on a really, really interesting, uh, uh, cave under Mare Tranquillitatis.

Yeah, let's, uh... Okay, so let's, uh, segue into that by looking at the first of all... one of the recent, very recent, um, uh, proposals that have been made for, um, for, uh, solving that problem. This was, uh, this was a paper that was published in the journal Planetary and Space Science this year. Uh, just, just, just this past April. Sylvain Blouier and five others authored this. Um, it's entitled "A Regolith-Based Lunar Habitat for Astronaut Protection and Organ Dose Assessment." So this new report, uh, was on ways to mitigate the risk from galactic cosmic rays and solar flares during lunar missions. Uh, the authors of this report point out that... and I'm going to quote here: "Future habitats must be designed with robust shielding against these hazards." Turns out there is a potential solution in the form of lunar regolith. Now, here's the definition of lunar regolith: "The layer of loose rock, dust, sand, and soil resting on the bedrock that constitutes the surface layer of most dry land on the Earth, the moon, and other large solid aggregated celestial objects." End of, end of definition. It is readily available on the moon, and it does not incur heavy transport costs, uh, that would be, uh, that would occur with the lifting of pre-fabricated materials from the earth. Uh, so for this work, the authors simulated the effectiveness of a two-layer dome with an inner layer consisting of a thin aluminum-based alloy covered by an outer layer composed of regolith. So this is what the authors explain in their introductory remarks: "Amid growing geopolitical competition, national space agencies are increasingly focused on returning to the moon. Unlike the Apollo program, the Artemis program aims to establish a permanent base where astronauts will stay on the lunar surface for extended periods ranging from weeks to several months and brave the harsh environmental conditions. Among the foremost concerns is the threat of space radiation and its potential impact on astronauts in the short and long term following exposure." End of quote from the paper. So among the radiation hazards that are faced by astronauts are one: solar energetic particle events, acronym SEP, that usually occur during solar maximum periods, when the sun goes into a hyperactive stage. It starts spewing out these highly energetic particles, right? And this forms a, a type of radiation that could affect, uh, living things, could, would certainly affect humans on the moon. Right. The other one are galactic cosmic rays that occur when the moon is in a quiet period, because when the... I mean, sorry, when the sun is active, it acts... the, uh, solar, uh, wind acts as a buffer that essentially shields or insulates the earth from the most intense of the galactic cosmic rays, uh, which is symbolized by the, uh, acronym GCR. Uh, so you have highly energetic solar particle events during periods of hyperactive sun, and during periods of quiescent sun, of inactivity, you... that now allows the galactic cosmic rays to, to get in, uh, and so that dominates during periods of solar inactivity. So these two threats to astronaut safety are considered distinct threats. Uh, and they have to be treated separately since they, uh, their biological effects are... between GCRs and SEPs are different from each other.

And now I'm going to show a diagram. So you can see here, uh, let me just enlarge it a little bit more. Okay. So this is, uh... you can see here, this is just a... do it looks kind of small to me. I think I'd be a bit claustrophobic in that, but the same principle would occur on a larger scale. And you can see here you got like the virtual source, which is the starting surface, and then you've got your... here's your 4mm thick, uh, aluminum dome, uh, and then you've got your layer of regolith. And so right here, this is showing this would be enough to, uh, to mitigate or filter out the, the cosmic rays and the solar energetic particles. And then you can see sort of a, a 3D view over here. See, maybe I could even go in a little further. So that's one possibility of creating these domes. Now, how could you do that? um, on a larger scale. Well, that's being explored right now as we speak. So, that's one possibility, but there's another possibility that you were actually referring to a few minutes ago. And what was that? What was that possibility? Do you remember?

Yeah, I do. So, we were kind of talking a little bit about the, uh, the cave that has been discovered on Mare Tranquillitatis. And this cave is really interesting because it's a lot wider underneath than it is at the surface. There is a, there's a cistern-like cavern here. And this also from NASA. If you're listening on audio, my apologies, but I'll try to explain as best as possible. Uh, thank you for being on Apple or Spotify, wherever, but we're also on YouTube and Rumble. But we're looking at a 100-meter cross-section at the top for this one cave. And now we have evidence of conduit caves that are 170 m deep. So 100 m wide, 170 m deep. potentially conduit caves connecting some of these openings in the lunar regolith and actually the lunar surface, uh, rock. We actually have, uh, a place where you could build a space station or, uh, habitation, a colony, full colony below the surface of the moon, which is amazing. And before you say, "Well, there's no resources." Well, there's some... there's some other really interesting, uh, evidence. By the way, we were talking about the moon being a, a fantastic time capsule. Uh, real quick, I, I'll share this. This is from NASA. "NASA Mission Uncovers the Moon's Buried Treasures." Again, we'll put this link in the description, but this is really interesting. NASA has convincingly confirmed the presence of water ice and characterized its patchy distribution in permanent... the permanently shadowed regions of the moon, like the cave that we were just speaking about. They dropped one of the, uh, uh, boosters from the LCROSS. Uh, and when that impacted, it kicked up a huge regolith, uh, uh, plume, and in that plume... or read from here: "The twin impacts of the LCROSS and a companion rocket stage in the moon's, uh, Cabeus crater on October 9th, 2009, lifted a plume of material that might not have seen direct sunlight for billions of years. As the plume traveled nearly 10 miles above the rim of Cabeus, instruments aboard the LCROSS and the LRO made observations of the crater and debris in the vapor clouds." That's the important part here. "After impacts, grains of mostly pure water ice, uh, were lofted into the sunlight in the vacuum of space. Seeing mostly pure water, uh, ice grains in the plume means water ice was somehow delivered to the moon in the past, or this is important: chemical processes have been causing ice to accumulate in large quantities." They also see, uh, uh, volatile compounds and, uh, you know, like methane and a few other things present in this discovery. So really, really interesting stuff that is being kept in craters just like the one here near the Apollo landing site, Apollo 11 site, and, uh, possibly really good institute, uh, uh, resource mining available. But either comets or, you know, and some of this might be comet debris, but there, there are some other explanations too, and I don't know if we'll get to it this time, but it's that there are some interesting explanations potentially for how ice is forming on the moon chemically.

Well, yeah. I mean, I first became aware of these holes back in 2010. Uh, where was it? It was, uh, was it in the journal Science? Let's see. It was a, it was an article, "Entire Down the Lunar Rabbit Hole." This was published on July 20th... Again, I can, I'll find out the, uh, the exact, uh, reference and we can include that. But, uh, July 12th, 2010, uh, "A whole new world came to life for Alice when she followed the white rabbit down the hole. There was a grinning cat, a hookah-smoking caterpillar, a mad hatter, and much more. It makes you wonder what's waiting down the rabbit hole on the moon. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, is beaming back images of caverns hundreds of feet deep, beckoning scientists to follow," says Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, principal investigator of the LRO camera. He said, "They could be entrances to a geologic wonderland. We believe the giant holes are skylights that formed when the ceilings of underground lava tubes collapsed. Japan's Kaguya spacecraft first photographed the enormous caverns last year. Now, the powerful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, the same camera that photographed Apollo landers and astronauts' tracks in the moon dust, is giving us enticing high-resolution images of the cavern's entrances and their surroundings." So, here we go. Look at this is one here. "This pit in the moon's Marius Hills is big enough to fit the White House completely inside." And then we have another one. "This cavern in Mare Ingenii is almost twice the size of the previous one in the Marius Hills." So nobody knows how deep these things go. They could go into a huge honeycombed labyrinth of underground caves. And as it turns out, those caves would be ideal for... for shielding astronauts or colonies or whatever it might be. Temperature consistently inside those caves... consistently inside those caves where you have 200... I think it's 230 during the day and negative something. Uh, I'll, I'll, I'll pull those exact numbers up. I won't misspeak, but keep going.

Yeah. So I mean, with, with that knowledge now, it changes the whole equation of colonies on the moon.

It does. Now if we had an energy source that becomes the next interesting question that we'll explore in future... is innovations that are on the horizon of energy sources that could be used to power... and we'll talk about geothermal on the moon maybe next time, because that's a whole interesting study all on its own. But 260 plus Fahrenheit, 120 degrees C during the day. And I misspoke, negative 280° at nighttime. 170°. So that gets a bit chilly. So compare that to 67° Fahrenheit, 17° C all day. 57 or 67? 60... uh, 63°. Here we go. So I, I read one that said 67 and this one says 63. It's 17 C. Well, that's... So I mean that's to me... I love a 67 degree temperature.

Yeah.

I'm too warm when it's 70°. I like s in the 60s. So 63, it's perfect.

Yeah. I'm from Minnesota, right?

Okay.

So I like it a little, little cooler.

Yeah.

But so, so there you got... Yeah. So now let's consider what we've got. We've discovered that the moon is an incredible source of resources and raw materials. The evidence is, is really supporting the notion that there's going to be abundant water salvageable on the moon. We know that some parts of the lunar regolith are up to 40% oxygen. Now we have these giant caves. I mean, it almost looks like somebody designed the moon just to be there waiting for us, so that we... to make it a little bit easier for us to become a spacefaring civilization. Why not use it? Why not?

So, the lunar ark. This is one of the themes and ideas now we've been discussing, but this was way back in 2007. And I saved this 'cause I was already by 2007 I'd already been thinking for at least a decade or more that the moon was a likely perhaps ark for the preservation of human civilization in the event of a catastrophe, a global catastrophe. This is what, what was published on August 14th, 2007, in National Geographic: "The moon should be developed as a sanctuary for civilization in case of a cataclysmic cosmic impact. According to an international team of experts, NASA already has blueprints to create a permanent lunar outpost by the 2020s." Well, you see, just as always when government does something, we're running behind schedule, right? Um, and what it's taken is some international competition. It's taken the, you know, China, India, Japan to say, well, screw you. If you're going to sit on your duff, we're going to the moon. And then we have the private sector. You know, for all whatever you may think about Elon Musk, look, he's spearheading what could potentially be one of the most important evolutionary developments of human civilization, along with Jeff Bezos. And I'm... Let's not get into talking about Katy Perry in space. You know, who knows? I don't know. It looked like a publicity stunt, but who knows? I don't know. Or, or, um, you know, Virgin Galactic. There's other incipient private space... the private space industry is set to really take off to the next level, and I'm 100% for it.

Anyways, let's go on here. Uh, but that plan should be, uh, expanded to include, uh, a way to preserve humanity's learning, culture, and technology if Earth is hit by a doomsday asteroid or comet, said Jim Burke of International Space University in France. And we should probably reach out to them. Um, because what I'd like to see happen is an international network of space enthusiasts getting together, um, to help move this paradigm forward and convince people, um, that it probably is presenting the optimum option for the future of our civilization on this planet. And if you don't think so, well, articulate some alternatives. I'd like to hear it. I haven't heard them. I've been asking for them for 40 years now and haven't heard them. So, um, so Burke, once a project manager on some of the earliest American lunar landings, now heads an ISU study on surviving a collision with a near-Earth object. "An impact of the size that wiped out the dinosaurs hasn't happened since long before the rise of humans," he pointed out. "Yet scientists' expanding knowledge of asteroids and craters left throughout the solar system has created a consensus that Earth remains vulnerable to a civilization-crushing collision." And I've been documenting many near misses since this was published in 2007. I started documenting near misses in 1988. And there have been dozens. There have been dozens. Not ones that would cause mass extinction on the scale of the dinosaurs, but a considerable number that could cause major disruptions to civilization.

Um, uh, this called for the creation of a space age Noah's Ark, Burke said, a lunar ark. "Humans are just beginning to send trinkets of technology and culture into space. NASA's recently launched Phoenix Mars lander, for example, carries a mini disc inscribed with stories, art, and music about Mars. The Phoenix lander is a precursor mission, uh, in a decades-long project to transplant the essentials of humanity onto the moon and eventually Mars. The International Space University team is now on a more ambitious mission to start building a lunar biological and historical archive, uh, initially through robotic landings on the moon. Laying the foundation for rebuilding the terrestrial internet plus an Earth-moon extension of it should be a priority." The founders of the group Alliance to Rescue Civilization agreed that extending the internet from the Earth to the Moon could help avert a te... technological dark age following nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions. Um, and then we have a quote here. Read: "Killer asteroids, a real but remote risk." Uh, but the group also advocates creating a moon-based repository of Earth's life, complete with human-staffed, uh, facilities to preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements and of the species important to our civilization, said ARC's Robert Shapiro, a biochemist at New York University.

Now, in 2007, there weren't any serious concerns about nuclear war, but in the last couple of years, we've moved dangerously closer to that as a possibility. And even now as we speak, uh, these corrupt leaders in, in Europe are proposing that Ukraine start launching, uh, 300-mile, 400-mile missiles at Moscow to achieve what? To accomplish what? So see, that's that to me symbolizes the alternative. You know, there's a major fork in the road. We're at this fork right now, and people need to [expletive] wake up, right? Because one or the other, we're going to go down this road and, and make no mistake, why are we there? Again, it's about resources. It's about who's going to control those resources underground in Ukraine. Trillions of dollars of resources, precious metals, strategic metals, hydrocarbons, natural gas, all of that, right? So, we're willing to risk World War III and potentially nuclear war to struggle over Earth's presumably finite resources. Are we going to go that route, or are we going to go the route of what we you and I have just been talking about? Now, if you don't believe, again, I'm going to say this again. If you don't believe that this is something we should pursue, that we should be sitting down with the Russians, the Chinese, whoever, the Japanese, the Indian government, which is now moving forward with a space program, whoever it might be, right? Even the, probably the, the Arab world now is becoming more and more, uh, attuned to the idea of, of establishing their own version of the space program. Well, we need to be sitting down as an international community and saying, "What kind of a future are we going to have?" If you don't want to do this, if you don't think we need an outpost on the moon, a colony on the moon, a base on the moon, what's your alternative? I want to hear it. I want to hear it in detail. Articulate that. And if you can't do it, then shut up and get on board.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, really what, what, what it comes down to is: do you have a mindset of growing the pie, or fighting over the pieces? Do you want to bake more?

Exactly.

Or you want to just squabble.

Well, well said. That's exactly what it is. And there's a lot to explore, a lot to do, and we should be about doing that.

Yeah.

And so, Donald Trump, are you listening? You came in with some, some, you know, some things that I could have gotten behind. Um, let's get on with the program, Donald. We need to invigorate our space program. You know, you're saying we need a trillion dollars for the military. Well, to do what? I want to hear what our long-term strategic goals are with a trillion-dollar military. Does that include space? Or, or, or is the plan to just militarize space? Um, I don't think we need to go down that route. Um, and this is why I would like to ally with, uh, Space Force, because I definitely know there's interest in Space Force. I've gotten this directly from former Lieutenant Colonel Matt Lommire, who is a friend of mine. We were actually going to have a conference and I was going to speak at it at Space Force about planetary defense. This was pre-COVID, and with the onset of CO... well, that got put on hold, and then we were regrouping after CO when they started opening things up again. Matt Lommire was spearheading a, uh, a, a second iteration of the conference where we would be discussing, uh, planetary defense. And then what happened? Well, he wrote this book right here, "Irresistible Revolution," talking about how the, how the Pentagon was succumbing to all of this wokeness, diversity, equity...

Inclusion was becoming more important than merit, becoming more important than skills and abilities. Um, in an institution where your abilities and skills should be paramount above everything else, right? Um, and so because he wrote this book and went on a couple of podcasts to talk about it, he got booted from Space Force. Um, he may end up becoming under secretary of the Air Force. I hope he gets approved. I haven't heard the latest. I need to look at that where that's at, if it's in limbo or what. Um, but yeah, so I think there is an interest in Space Force, and I think that ultimately that is going to become the ultimate rationale for the existence of Space Force. I think that will at some point supersede, uh, you know, the other ideas which are, you know, securing, uh, space for American interests and so on, which I'm, I'm for. I don't want it to be taken over by another country, but I believe we need to pursue cooperative.

I mean, I was just looking into the, um, the building of, of Grand Coulee Dam and Hoover Dam, which used to be called Boulder Dam. And I have to confess, I liked the name. When I was a kid, it was Boulder Dam and then later changed to Hoover. I like Boulder Dam better, but when they built, uh, when the, uh, bids were let out, um, when the contracts were let out for bidding on Grand Coulee Dam, which at the time was the largest, I think was the largest engineering project in the, in the world at that time. Um, certainly it was in America. Yeah. Well, it was certainly in North America, but I think the world, right? Um, there was no single company that could undertake the construction. Uh, there was it was a big complicated project that had many facets and many skill sets that needed to be integrated. So what happened was three companies that had been competitors formed a joint venture. They be they formed a consortium, and only that way were they able to pull it off. Like I think they, it was in from it took five years, about, I think it was 1937, it was finished in 1942. When Boulder Dam was built, and these are huge complicated structures, you had literally six formerly competitive companies that formed a consortium, and under that cooperative approach, they were able to again create these incredible monuments, uh, epic testimony to the, to the, uh, skills and abilities of the engineering skills and abilities and technical capabilities of humans when, when we, um, when we stop fighting each other.

Friendly competition, hell yeah. Absolutely. Friendly competition is great. But when we start killing each other and throwing potentially nukes at each other, we've gone too far, right? And it's better at that point to let's say, hey, let's work together because we've got a much larger common goal here where everybody's going to win if we pull this thing off. So I kind of look at now, our space, the, the, the creating a spacefaring civilization is the counterpart for our degeneration alive on Earth now to the great cathedral building enterprise of the High Middle Ages, when you had this incredible cooperative effort coming together across, uh, France, England, Germany, hundreds of thousands of highly skilled craftspeople from stonemasons to engineers to astronomers to carpenters to glazers to sculptors, uh, sculptors. All of these things were brought together under this incredible, almost miraculous undertaking that we should definitely talk about more because I really do believe it provides an analog because to pull off that incredible epic enterprise of the Gothic Cathedral building era, you had to have the entire society motivated and inspired and moved to do this, or it couldn't have happened. Because for every person working on the actual project itself, whether they be stonemasons, sculptors, glazers, carpenters, engine, whatever, right? The vast diverse skill set brought together for every one person there had to be 10 people in the supportive social infrastructure to make that possible.

So I think that might be a good place to leave it for this episode of Squaring the Circle. I think so. I think so. There's a lot more to talk about and we will as we go forward. We'll have to talk about, uh, lunar. Do you want to talk about that? LTPS. Yeah. Let's save that. We're talking here. John Arthur is referring to Lunar Transient Phenomenon. Yep. Very interesting. Very interesting phenomena. And maybe we'll get into some more stuff, uh, next time. I'll, I'll, I'll just tease it. There was a lot that we were talking about for this episode. We'll save it for next time. Okay. Yeah, it'll be fun. It's going to be fun. And it was fun seeing you again, John. It was certainly fun being out in the field with you. And, uh, I tell you, you made an impression on everybody, man. Carrying. Tell what, what that, how much did that camera setup weigh that you had? About 25 pounds. Oh, well, that's not too bad. But it was big and it was bulky, and some of those areas we went into climbing down, climbing up, people were impressed. John, you made a, you made a favorable impression on a lot of people. It was, it was fun. So, we've got that stuff that's going to be coming up, and that is going to be some great stuff. I cannot wait to see it. We're going to have fun.

What if I told you that the moon has frequently exhibited unexplained activity on its surface? Flashing lights, mysterious fogs, changing colors, ejections of vapor. For centuries, inexplicable visual phenomena has been witnessed on the moon. What explanations have been offered by scientists for this activity on a celestial body that is assumed to be geologically dead? Is it assumed that this activity is entirely natural in origin? And if not, what could this possibly imply? Join me today as we dive into the unanswered questions surrounding the mysterious subject of transient lunar phenomena as well as other curious lunar anomalies on Squaring the Circle.

[Music]

Greetings everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Squaring the Circle, and I am here today and I'm going to be joined by my friend and colleague John Arthur. Hello, John. Good to see you again. Good to see you as well, sir. Howdy. Here we are. Yes, here we are, uh, once again diving into interesting topics. So far, John, the things we've been talking about together on this program, uh, to me have been extremely interesting, and it's great to have someone to communicate, uh, with about these kinds of topics who has an interest and understands and gets it. So, we've got some interesting stuff to dive into in this episode. Uh, in the opening statement, we, I was talking about transient lunar phenomena or TLPS. Transient lunar phenomena or TLPS are evanescent. Hey, there's a word for us. Evanescent. While I'm reading this, why don't you look up evanescent? I like that word. TLPS are evanescent, localized glows and obscurations on the moon. Uh, and then it's talking about mentions three craters. Aristarchus, Alphonsus, and Schröter's Valley are well-known areas of activity. The emitted light is usually described as reddish or pinkish, sometimes with a sparkling or flowing appearance. The coloration may extend for a distance of 10, 10 miles or more on the lunar surface with brighter spots two to three miles across and is commonly associated with, now this is interesting, veiling of surface features. The average duration of an event is some 20 minutes, but it may persist intermittently for a few hours. No permanent alteration has been detected at the site of any TLP. These phenomena are regarded as distinct from the possible low-level general luminescence most easily detected during a total lunar eclipse.

So, what did we find for evanescent? I want to add that word to my vocabulary. So, somebody says, "Well, how are how are you feeling today, Randall?" And I can say, "I'm feeling a bit evanescent." I have an evanescent cold, or I had an evanescent, uh, moment of heat exhaustion today, meaning transient or soon passing out of sight or memory. Well, I don't. Yeah. Well, then actually sometimes I do feel a bit evanescent, like like you're passing out of memory or out of sight. Yes. Um, well, there we go. Um, so transient, something that is passing by. So these are really, really short. Some of them are seconds, some of them are minutes, some of them are hours. Yeah. Well, here we've got some interesting, uh, examples witnessed. Now, this one, the first one here that, um, this was going back to 1787. Famous astronomer William Herschel. So, in April of 1787, astronomer William Herschel observed three luminous spots on the moon's dark side, interpreting them as active volcanoes. Now, how did astronomer William Herschel observe three luminous spots on the moon's dark side in 1787? Interpreting them as active volcanoes. Contemporary research suggests that Herschel may have witnessed the impact of a meteorite, possibly from the Lyrids meteor shower, causing a transient glow due to impact melt. Well, that would certainly make sense, but I'm still not, uh, understanding how he would observe three luminous spots on the moon's dark side. It, I'm, I'm sure the account is talking about a partial, a partial moon. Has to be. It's got, it's got to be. Yeah. Has to be talking about that. And, and so the, the one thing I find interesting is by definition, TLPS, they generally say that there's no, um, there's no deformation related to TLPS. But the assumption here is that obviously he, he saw a meteorite, uh, shower or meteorite impact. So that's interesting to me because they, they've dated some of these these impacts as, uh, much older than some of these events because it, because of our basic understanding of lunar geology. So, I'm not, I'm not sure what to make of that because again, by definition, TLPS, they want to classify them one way, but then here we see it's a potentially a meteorite impact. Don't know. Interesting. Worth noting.

Okay, this is so now in 1866, lunar. Yeah, I remember first reading about this and thinking, well, now this is certainly one of the more interesting examples. In 1866, lunar observer J. F. Julius Schmidt reported that the Lin, the Lin, the Lin, L-I-N-E with the little, uh, mark above it. What? So that adds an extra syllable, I believe. Right. The Lynn. But for now, the Lynn crater, previously documented as a prominent feature. Hey, uh, what, why don't you pull that up and see if we can get an image of it? Uh, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, this is from space.com. Let me, let me open this up real quick. And by the way, you're correct. It is the Len Crater. Yeah. Okay. Uh, oop, let me get the, what do you call that? Uh, not hypocritical marks. Um, uh, and throw that up real quick. Here we go. Um, diacritical, I believe. Oh, look at that. So, that's the Len Crater. Uh-huh. Len Crater. Okay. So, listen to this. What, what J. F. Julius Schmidt reported in 1866 that the Len crater, previously documented as a prominent feature, had seemingly vanished or transformed into a mere white spot. This observation sparked debates about lunar surface changes and remains one of the most discussed TLP cases. Uh, interesting. Okay. Then we have another case here. On November 15th, 1953, Dr. Leon Stewart captured a photograph of a bright flash on the moon, which he interpreted as a meteorite, a meteor impact. Decades later, researchers identified a fresh lunar crater matching the location and timing of Stewart's observation, providing rare photographic evidence of a TLP. So there we go. I mean, so we've got at least in one circumstance, we have the evidence suggesting that it was in fact a meteorite impact. Um, and then, uh, during the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, astronauts Harrison Schmidt and Ronald Evans reported observing brief flashes of light on the moon's surface while in orbit. These observations added credibility to TLP reports as they came from trained observers in space. Now, my first thought is, is that a meteorite impact is going to provide a single flash. And if you've got a flashing or multiple flashes, what does that mean? A number of different question marks have arisen. Are we looking at natural phenomena? What is this? I don't, I don't know. But, uh, let's see. Here's another. This is from the book of the Moon by Thomas Hockey, and he's asking this question. Is the moon volcanically dead today? Not necessarily. He says, in recent times, there have been some notable claims of observation of activity on the moon. In 1958, Nikolai Kozyrev, who lived from 1908 to 1983, I note there he's born in the same year as the Tunguska event. Uh, he was with the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in the USSR. He saw a brightening around a crater. He was able to obtain a spectrum of it, which he claimed showed the presence of, get this, carbon-containing gases. Barbara Middlehurst has cataloged this case as well as other reports of transient lunar phenomena on the moon. Barbara Middlehurst, maybe she has a book. Why don't you, if you don't mind, Barbara Middlehurst, just like it sounds. So, Welsh astronomer. Uh, she lived from 1915 to 1955. Okay. Uh, see, oh, she lived, she retired to Clear Lake, Houston, the NASA, oh, so to speak. And see, she was an editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica in this field. Okay. Co-editor, uh, uh, with Gerald, uh, Kuiper, for Telescopes, 1960, The Solar System, 3 Planets and Satellites, Solar System, 4 The Moon, Meteorites and Comets. That's where I know her name from because I have the, I've got that hard book, hard copy, Moon, Meteorites and Comets. That's. Yep. It's right up there on the shelf. So, she was the editor of that book, correct? Correct. Co-editor with, uh, Gerard Kuiper. It's K-U-I-P. I think it's pronounced Kuiper. Is that Kuiper? Yeah, like Kuiper Belt. Ah, yeah. Looks like a good German name. Yes. So, John, you actually learned something today. Kuiper. I did. I've been a little frustrated in these episodes we've done because you keep seeming like you already know everything. Uh, okay. So, that's Barbara Middle. And when did she pass? She passed away, uh, at 95. In what year? 1995. Oh, in 1995. So, in 1995 she was 79. Just missed 80. She was in 1995. Uh, born in 1915. Uh-huh. Okay. That's when you after Tunguska. Yeah. Okay. So, Tunguska, that's kind of like the, the chronometric standard now by which everything is referred, right? Before, after Tunguska. Yeah. Okay. So, this is now, this was an article that came out in Science News back in 1971, during the heyday of Apollo, right? October 23rd, 1971. Uh, must have been an editor because we don't, we're not given the name of the, uh, the author of this article, but the title is Possible Observation of Water Vapor on the Moon. The presence or absence of water vapor on the moon is central to theories of lunar origin and development. And of course, the whole question of water on the moon is still a very important question, not as much now as as far as questions of lunar origin and development, but as far as lunar colonization. Um, after examining returns of Apollo 11, scientists were fairly convinced that there was no water there because of the lack of hydrous minerals, those that contain OH radicals in the samples. They theorized, therefore, that the original melt from which the rocks were formed had very little, if any, water. The returns from Apollo 12, 14, and 15 seem to support this finding. Now, John W. Freeman Jr. and H. Kent Hills of Rice University in Houston have announced what they believe to be water vapor detected on the moon by the Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment, or SIDE. Super Ion, uh, detector experiment, super, suprathermal ion detector experiment. Might look that up. Supra-thermal, supra-suprathermal, uh, ion detector experiment, uh, which goes by the acronym of SIDE, just S-I-D-E. And pulling it up. So that this was the, the, uh, instrument that they were using. Uh, the SIDE, or Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment, have been quietly measuring and then in, in, in quotes, clouds, clouds of low-energy ions, uh, during the lunar day and before sunrise and sunset. Ions thought to have escaped from the Earth's magnetic bow shock wave, and ions from man-made impacts, lunar landings, and liftoffs. So there could be water vapor, you know, generated by, uh, as it says, man-made impacts, lunar landings, and liftoffs. So the Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment, part of the LEAP package, measured positive ions reaching the lunar surface, including magnetospheric ions and those generated from ultraviolet ionization of the lunar atmosphere and from the free-streaming solar wind/lunar surface interaction. Okay. Flux, number, density, velocity, and energy, unit charge were determined for these ions. The scientific objectives of the experiment were to provide information on the energy and mass spectra of the positive ions close to the lunar surface. Okay. Measure the flux and energy spectrum of the positive ions in the Earth's magne, uh, magnetotail. Magnetotail. Yeah. On my computer, on my monitor, the, uh, the text is very small. Um, so, okay, well, that kind of gives us an idea. The experiment was housed in a rectangular box which was deployed on the surface of the moon by the astronauts during their first EVA. A bubble level on the top of the box was used to ensure proper leveling. Well, now that's what we use in, uh, you know, in, in our carpentry work. We have a little bubble level. Is that an image over there on the left of the instrument itself? Correct. Yes, it is. Let me, let me do that real quick. Okay. Just so we can see what the instrument looks like. This thing was sitting on the moon, and it was this thing that detected the water vapor. Yep. Okay. Um, so then let's go on and see what it says. Okay, so it's monitoring, okay, so it's monitoring, um, low-energy ions during the lunar day and before sunrise and sunset. Ions thought to have escaped from the Earth's magnetic bow shock wave, and the ions made from man-made impacts, lunar landings, and liftoffs. Okay, so pretty standard stuff. Everybody's okay. This is just what we would imagine we, it should be detecting. But on March 7th, the instrument saw something unusual at the number 14 site. A very high flux of ions in the spectrum predicted for water vapor. Apollo 12's SIDE also detected the ions. The flux of 783 counts per 1.2 seconds was much higher than anything seen before, more than 100 times greater than that detected when the lunar module vented. Another unusual aspect of the detection was that the flux occurred at the same time that swarms of moonquakes were detected. Rumblings that lasted from 12 to 14 hours. The ion occurrence began shortly after the moonquakes began and stopped shortly after the quakes ceased. Freeman speculates that water vapor could have come from a fissure created by the quakes, and says Hills, the findings would not contradict the lack of water vapor in materials found at the surface if the vapor was coming from deep within the lunar interior. So, is what would that imply or suggest if water vapor is coming out of the moon deep from within the lunar interior? Well, one of the scientists working on it, um, lunar scientist Farouk El-Baz, uh, said this, "The implications, if the observation is confirmed, are considerable. If water vapor is coming from the moon's interior, this is serious. It means that there is a drastic distinction between the different phases in the lunar interior, that the interior is quite different from what we have seen on the surface." So this was, uh, from an article that appeared in Sky and Telescope in 1991, March of 1991, simply entitled Lunar Transient Phenomena. Accounts of lunar transient phenomena, TLPS, are not new. Over the past 30 years, I have collected close to 2,000 observations dating from as far back as 557 AD. Wow. So, somebody back there at the early stages of the Dark Ages is witnessing some kind of TLP up on the moon. Most are visual reports of bright spots, flashes, hazes, and curious temporary colorations of the lunar soil. Reputable observers such as William Herschel, uh, Wilhelm Struve, and E. Barnard have seen them. Some TLPS have even been photographed as well as recorded polarimetrically, photometrically, and spectroscopically. Wait a minute. Spectroscopically. I'll get it. Hang on. Spectroscopically. That's a mouthful. Spectro-spectro-scopically. Spectroscopically. I'm going to have to practice that one. Yeah, you practice that one. I'll practice magnanimity, as we were talking about before we got on, when you said magnanimity. Magnanimity. Yikes. Okay. Um, so yeah, I will, uh, it's probably not that critical because we don't use that word that frequently. Like, that's not a word I use like on a daily basis. Spectro-spectro-scopically. Spectroscopically. I think I've got it. Yeah. Yet, John, despite a profusion of observations and six Apollo missions to the moon, the nature of TLPS remains elusive and their origin an enigma. I like enigmas. They've always fascinated things that don't seem to quite have a ready explanation that you can pull off the shelf. Um, so going on with the Sky and Telescope article, about 200 of some 30,000 lunar features visible in telescopes have been recorded as TLP sources. Half shown activity only once. Of the remainder, a mere dozen features contribute three-quarters of all reports. One area, Aristarchus, Herodotus, and Schröter's Valley is responsible for fully one-third of the total number cited. And I believe you pulled up an image of, uh, Aristarchus, didn't you? Yeah, previously. Let me pull it up right now. And so, has Herodotus, one of those smaller craters overlapping it? Maybe. Uh, let me pull that up. I'll start here in one moment. So, here's Aristarchus. Mhm. And Herodotus is to the right of it. I see what that looks like, a long valley extending out of it. Mhm. Now, that's interesting. The light of our last episode. It's interesting how the formation is has has run. Mhm. Because that, because it's at a curve as opposed to the, the other two valleys that are a straight shot, right? So, this is an oblique closeup. Oh, look at that. Here's where you can see it in the night sky. Okay. Okay. And then this is an LRO NAC image of the central peak with colors showing variations in the composition. Uh-huh. So that's interesting. That's the central peak. Okay. This is from the Clementine. Uh-huh. Okay. All right. Here we go. This is money. Aristarchus, Herodotus. There we go. Oh, yeah. Here are Aristarchus B and Z up to the north. U, T, and S to the south, and F and H. And for those of you on audio, we'll be putting this in the, uh, uh, links to these these different, uh, images in the description. Okay. Excellent. And there's one last one. And that is Aristarchus. Look at that. This is Aristarchus F. So it's the one that we were looking at right here below. I don't know if you're seeing me here. Hover over it with your mouse. Oh, yeah. There. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. So, yeah. And let's go to the, yeah. So, pretty good. Yeah, some good images there. Yep. Uh, so the Aristarchus, Herodotus, Schröter's Valley. Could Schröter's Valley be that what we saw coming off of Herodotus? Yes. Let me pull that back up. Actually, it's just to the northwest. So, let me see if I can get my cursor here. Here we go. And that's it up there. Just a little bit closer here. Here we go. I got it. Vallis Schröteri. So, it is a second, it is a second whole, whole, uh, uh, impact site. It's not the same. But that's interesting. Is it an impact site? Cuz you see how the valley actually shifts to the west. We're taking a bit of a detour here to, uh, tell a story that I think is going to be valuable. I was coming down the stairs and I think somebody just ahead of me had spilled a little bit. My foot hit it, slid out from under me, and I tumbled down three or four stairs to the bottom. I sure banged up my left knee. It was painful, but, uh, I was very relieved to remember that I had brought, I happened to pack my CBD from the God Sav and I was really grateful that I had remembered to do that. So, I, that night I put some of the sav on, went to bed. Though, I've, I've, you know, being in the construction and building industry, I've had many falls and injuries and stuff, and I figured I'm going to be laid up with this for a month. We drove home, I think it was three to four days later. I continued applying the sav, and I would say within a week, I was getting around pretty good. I always bring the oil, uh, when I travel, and I, I'm now after this episode, I'm like, okay, I'm always going to have the sav with me too.

Next paragraph says that most TLP activity occurs along the edges of maria near volcanic features like domes, sinuous rilles, and craters with dark halos or floors. But these regions, like the rest of the moon, have long been considered geologically dead. But here's the thing. I looked it up. Uh, Vallis, uh, Schröteri is believed to have been formed by volcanic activity. Oh, says, says, uh, Peter Wolszczak from, uh, Observing the Moon, his book in, in 2000, he published. Uh-huh. So, we're starting, we're starting to see maybe there is some volcanic activity on the moon. But the thing is though, okay, so when we talk volcanic activity, what time frame are we talking about? This is something that would have happened millions, hundreds of millions, billions, according to the standard chronologies, or is this something? I mean, because we're looking at the, the TLPS now, we're looking at, are you know, within the, well, said, I think we got the, the, the earliest one we we had quoted was 550 something. Yeah. Yep. Okay. So now here's another one. On January 24th, 1956, amateur lunar observer R. H. Richert was drawing the crater Liebig on the edge of Mare Humorum. Oh, this ought to be interesting. When something bright flashed in the field of his 7-inch telescope. The flare came from the nearby crater Cavendish, which was just emerging from the lunar night. Closer inspection revealed that a peak on the crater's eastern wall was repeatedly flashing. Richert called astronomer Brian Warner and told him what to look for. Warner too saw the flashes and called them so conspicuous that they were seen immediately. The other peaks in the vicinity remained normal. So the, it was actually then, uh, the flashing came from the crater Cavendish, starting with a C. Cavendish. Yes, sir. It's right here. Well, let's do this. There we go. Cavendish. So I suppose that's the larger crater. Something that's interesting here that just sort of an aside, when you see these overlapping craters, what that kind of has allowed astronomers to do is to establish a relative chronology. Not absolute, but relative. Which simply means that the smaller, younger crater, the smaller crater is the younger is younger than Cavendish. Why? Because it, it breaks and superimposes itself on the rim. Whereas if Cavendish was the younger crater, its rim would remain intact, and you would only see like half of the smaller crater. That makes sense, doesn't it? Absolutely. Um, and then this is Liebig. Again, for those of you on audio, just check out the comment or check out the, uh, description. But this is Liebig. Liebig on the moon. Okay. On the night of November 2nd to the 3rd, in 1958, Soviet astronomer Nikolai A. Kozyrev witnessed a strange phenomenon while making spectrograms of the crater Alphonsus with the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory's 50-inch reflector. The crater Alphonsus. So that's Alphonsus. As he watched through the telescope's guiding eyepiece, he saw the crater's central peak blur and turn an unusual reddish color. The spectrograms confirmed his visual impressions of a volcanic event. They show an emission spectrum of carbon vapor. So there we go. Carbon vapor again. So there's the crater central peak. Very obvious in this one, isn't it? Correct. Right. Central peak blur and turn an unusual reddish color. So, okay. What? Okay. So, a vol, uh, a volcanic event that's spewing out carbon dioxide from the central peak of this crater. What's going on? Carbon vapor. H. What does that seem to imply? Good question. Okay. Then on July 19th, 1969, the Apollo 11 command module had just achieved orbit around the moon when the mission control center in Houston, Texas, received word that amateur astronomers reported transient phenomena in the vicinity of the crater Aristarchus. So Aristarchus seems to be a hotbed of TLPS. Asked to check out the situation. Astronaut Neil Armstrong looked out his window toward the Earthlit region and observed, quote, an area that is considerably more illuminated than the surrounding area. It seems to have a slight amount of fluorescence to it. Fluorescence. So what is fluorescence? F-L-O-U-R-E-S-C-E-N-C-E. Fluorescence. Uh, looks like a lower. Yeah, just as, uh, Herodotus here looks like is then emerging from the lunar night. And what is this coming up this way? Uh, here, that's going to be, uh, Vallis Schröteri. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so that seems to be somehow associated with these craters. And again, Vallis is associated with volcanic formation. Not sure, but that's the current hypothesis on deck. This is from an old journal from Scientific American way back in the early part of the 20th century. John A. Cook is asking, "Is the Moon a Dead World?" "So far as can be ascertained by the most careful examination, not the slightest change ever takes place on its surface." Thus wrote one of the world's greatest astronomers, Simon Newcomb, in Astronomy for Everybody, page 128, published in 1910. This appearance app, this appears to be the consensus of opinion among astronomers. Notwithstanding the evidence that the crater Len was prior to the year 1866 a six-mile crater, very deep, visible under all illuminations, and that in that year it became invisible for some months, seemingly concealed by a fog or haze that hung over it, and upon clearing up, a much smaller crater was in its place and surrounding it a white spot like a drop of whitewash on the dark sea floor, occupying the space of the original crater. There we go. This map is based upon a survey of 300 TLPS by Barbara Middlehurst and Patrick Moore. Shows the approximate distribution of observed events. Red-hued events are in red. The remainder are in yellow. So every red dot that you see was a TLP that had a red hue to it. Uh, the description, this map displays an approximate distribution of transient lunar phenomena. It is based on a monochrome map by Barbara Middlehurst and Patrick Moore that was published in the book On the Moon in 2001. Red dots indicate TLPS that appeared to the observer as a reddish cloud. Yellow dots are all other events. H, you should, you've got that interesting video, uh, of some of the events. I think maybe we should take a look at that. And again, from the lunar surface, you can see if you're on audio, you can see a bright flash that's very short. Mhm. This is a black and white, effectively image here. So we don't know the hue, but it's very bright. Yeah. Yeah, I see it. And Jim, ID, where are we? We just missed it. Here we go. It's very faint. So, if you're watching, you can see what we're talking about here. Let's go a bit further. And at the bottom of the screen, thank you. I know you're sharing. I don't need to see the sharing screen. There we go. There's our little dot. Oh, right down there. Play. Bottom center. Right. Correct. Bottom center. Right at the, yeah, right at the edge. And then scroll just a bit further. So, in the green box, you see that little itty-bitty light? What's going on there? It's interesting. And then we have another one in the green box, bottom right. Okay. Just, just caught it. It was small, but I saw a second. Yeah, it's a flash in a pan. Then they have this UFO caught. Now, we were talking, is this a, is this an aircraft or or what? This is at the Alamo. Uh, um, we looked that up before we started tonight. And it's a 14-inch optic. So it's a 14-inch element in the bottom of the telescope. So the main light-gathering source. Well, I mean, would you, would you capture an image like that? Let's say it's an airplane in the atmosphere. Are you going to catch that in this? I mean, when you're, we're, we're looking at something that's a quarter million miles away. I know it's strange. Where is this object within that, in the depth of field? Is it near to the camera? Is it out there? I mean, what the hell is it? Yeah, explain that to people. You would think it would be much, much larger if this was an aircraft in atmosphere. You would think, but someone who's much smarter than I am and has actually lots of experience with optics might be able to speak to that. If you know, hey, drop that in the comment section. What do you think? You think that's an aircraft or is it something else? So, looks, looks to me like an aircraft, but the, but the perspective is odd. You would think it would be much larger in the element. Well, yeah, because if it's close up, I mean, obviously the, the width of this thing here, you're encompassing what here? 1,000 miles from left to right within the image. Yeah. And then, and then it's going to be closer. If this is closer, obviously it's closer, but if it was in, say, the Earth's atmosphere, um, wouldn't it pass through the frame so fast we wouldn't even? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. This is weird. It is. It is a very interesting video. Can we watch the video of just the part where this thing is flashing through the, the, the field of view that fast? Do it again. What in the hell is? Yeah. Huh. So, it's interesting. And this is how fast it goes. It's, here we go. Just in, you know, a matter of a second or two, it's across the frame. Mhm. But it's quite a few frames for something that would be in atmosphere. That's interesting. So, but we have all these small transient phenomena, these little blinking lights, these flashes, and some of them are happening in the same place. Which now we know that the moon is not one homogeneous chunk there. It's porous. Yeah. Talked about last, what it appears. And we'll get into that in just a second. Well, before we segue, we got that one last case that's very interesting to me. Uh, this was the record of Gervase of Canterbury. He was an English monk and historian, and he's citing the eyewitness account of five monks on the evening of June 18th, 1178. So what I'm going to read here is translated directly from the Latin. Now, there was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase, its horns were tilted toward the east. Okay. And suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of this division, a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out over considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile, the body of the moon, which was below, writhed and throbbed like a wounded snake. So, what were they witnessing? Well, let's see. It was, um, it was, uh, Jack Horton. Jack Horton suggested that possibly it was an impact that produced the Giordano Bruno crater. Pull up an image of that once. And one reason why he, now that's been disputed. Others have thought, uh, that Bruno Crater was too old. Uh, I don't have an opinion on the matter. However, relatively speaking, Bruno Crater is young. And one way that you know that it's young is because the, uh, the, uh, galactic cosmic rays haven't caused the ejecta blanket to darken. The ejecta blanket is very light. Yeah. Like you can see right there. Um, yeah, look at that. That's crater Bruno. It's, I think it's about 20 miles in diameter, and, uh, it's a very young, relatively young crater. So, uh, Horton proposed that it seemed to be about in the right place one would expect it to be. But, uh, whether Bruno Crater is or isn't the cause of what these five monks witnessed, they obviously witnessed something. And I would think that it sounds to me like it was probably some type of an impact event. Being June, in in June, and that would have been, uh, that would have actually, when you adjust from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, this comes very close to being, uh, the peak of the Taurid meteor shower. So this could have been, I think this has actually even been proposed this event as being an impact of a Taurid meteor on the moon in 1178. And that's what I was alluding to earlier. Some of these are are dated. Some of these craters are dated much older than, uh, supposedly human human dwelling on the on the Earth is by the typical geological, you know, historical concept. And then this one, I don't know, it's interesting. Yeah, it'd make a lot of sense. And I think you just reminded me of that word that I was looking for earlier and I couldn't think where they sometimes you hear quite frequently people substituting the letter B or inserting the letter B. So I've got to get this off my chest if that's okay. Okay. So there's a word that Randall hates it when people insert a B into this word. Yes. The word is supposedly. Supposedly. Supposedly. And supposedly, the way you pronounce supposedly is supposedly. However, I quite frequently hear people pronouncing it supposably. I didn't say supposedly, did I? No, not you, John. Because if you did say that, John, I think I would immediately have to be seeking a new, uh, co-host, a new producer. Yes, I think so. But supposedly, you would. Supposably, I would find a new producer. Yes. Someone is typing a comment right now. Hey, I say it that way. No. Okay. Well, don't. So, supposedly, uh, there is a ratio between crater width and crater depth. This is from, this is one of the early books, one of my favorites back when I really started diving into this stuff kind of semi-seriously. Uh, Zdeněk Kopal, Kopal, Kopal, in 1979, wrote a book called The Realm of the Terrestrial Planets, and he's talking about the number of craters on the moon. He says, "The number of craters on the moon is indeed immense. Those with diameters in excess of 1 kilometer are estimated to be more than 300,000 on its visible hemisphere and to at least 1 million on its far side. Those smaller still number too many for any realistic estimate. There are 16 formations of the type enclosed within unbroken walls with diameters in excess of 200 kilometers. The crater Clavius, Clavius, near the moon's south pole is one of them." And I think we were looking at that a little earlier, weren't we? Um, the crater, I believe it would be Clavius, not Clavius. Clavius is correct. Okay. Uh, one second. That's that's Bruno. There it is. Yeah. Notice how, okay. There. Yeah. How, how you got these smaller craters, uh, juxtaposed on the rim of the larger one, which, you know, immediately tells you that they're obviously younger. All of those craters in the middle, the smaller ones that you see there, this, they're, uh, obviously formed. So, so Clavius, right? We, we agreed it was Clavius. So, Clavius formed first, and then subsequent to the formation of Clavius, you had all these younger craters that were formed. And the ratio you were looking for earlier is 1.1 to, uh, sorry, 0.11 to 2. Uh, oh, I believe, uh, the diameter to depth, to depth, diameter to depth. Say that again. I want to. So, let me, let me pull it up. 0.1 to 20. Uh, the diameter will, uh, multiply the diameter by 0.20 would be the diameter. Right. And 1.1 is the depth because obviously the diameter is greater than the depth. So, so no, no, no. So, so you're, you're, you're in a range. So your, your depth, your depth will be 10, 11, 11 to 20% of the D. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Got it. What? Say the, say the number again. Right. So it's 0.11.1. So let's say we have a crater that's 12 miles in diameter times 0.11. Its depth should be, uh, 1.32 miles. That's, or that's at one end of the spec, and the other one was 2 something. Uh, yeah, 2.0. So it would be, uh, oh, just times two, 2.4 miles in, in depth. In depth. Right. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that. I knew that. I just didn't understand what you were saying. Yeah, I, I apologize. It's okay, John. I, I forgive you. Um, thank you. Yes. Um, but you're going to, I expect you will be doing much better in the future, right? Absolutely. Okay. All right. So 0.2. So we're basically saying if we're using 0.2, that's easy because now we're saying the width is five times the depth. Correct. So a 10-mile crater, 2 miles wide. Uh, I mean, sorry, a 10-mile wide crater, 2 miles deep. 20-mile crater, 4 miles deep. Right. Got it. So, he's talking here in, in the realm of the terrestrial planets. Uh, he says there are 16 formations of the type enclosed within unbroken walls with diameters in excess of 200 kilometers. Okay. So if we go, I'm going to just, I like to think in miles. Uh, so that's 120 miles. If I go times 0.2, [Music] that's a depth of 24 miles. The crater Clavius, near the moon's south pole, is one of them. Over 70 craters, 32 of which are visible from the Earth, possess diameters between 100 and 200 kilometers. These are usually characterized by fairly smooth floors, sometimes checkered by smaller craters, such as, for instance, Clavius, which are again absent in others. The elevation of their walls, one to three kilometers, represents so small a fraction of their dimensions that even their rims are mostly below the horizon for an observer situated at the center. And I have a graph here of a number of these, uh, craters. And you see the scale bar at the bottom. So like Alphonsus, right? That looks to be darn close to maybe 80 to 90 miles in diameter. But again, what seems to happen here is that the, the, the classical scaling ratio, diameter to depth, seems to hold until you get up to 18 or 20 miles, right? But then crater diameter continues to increase, but crater depth does not. Okay. So what's going on here? Like down here, this. So we see that Alphonsus has a central uplift peak. Archimedes does not. But if Archimedes, looking at this scale bar, it looks like Archimedes is roughly 50 miles in diameter. So 50 times, times 0.2, then is going to be 10 miles in depth. It should be a hole in the lunar. Now, I don't know if that's the, the original depth of the crater, or does that include the fallback breccia that infills the crater and usually makes the final crater, uh, shallower than the transient crater when all the stuff has been excavated, but before it's infilled back in. Let me see here. Look at the crater Plato. So now look at, look at the cross-section of Copernicus there. What you can see there is the central uplift, and then you're seeing the two flanking peaks. That would be the cross-section of a central ring. You can see the Tycho has a central uplift, and so does, would it be Theophilus, more so than Theophilus? I think it would be Theophilus is what I'm guessing. Now, on Earth, the, the infilling, there's definitely a distinction between the three, three things. The maximum depth, which would be what's called the transient crater. Then in the, say, in the immediate aftermath, after all of the fallback material and slumping has infilled the crater, and then over time, often times you'll have some rebound and subsequent also infilling. So in, say, in the immediate aftermath of the, at, at, in those first few seconds of impact, that's the maximum depth, that's the transient crater. Then you would have in the days following, weeks following, years following, you'll have the second stage, which has had the material falling back in because there's probably a lot of, uh, instabilities. Now, this is on Earth. You're going to have slumping and stuff, but on the moon as well. It certainly has been observed on Mars. And this is going to infill the crater. And then over long periods of time, you're going to have more sediment accumulation and possibly some more rebounding vertical movement upwards. So the final depth of the crater may not be close to what the original depth was. But here, you know, like looking at Archimedes and Plato, okay, you got a 50-mile crater that should be 20 miles deep, but, or 10 miles deep rather. Um, but where's the material that would slump into it? I mean, and is there rebound? Was it originally five? Let's see. So, let's say 50 miles deep times, um, yeah. So, that's 10 miles deep. So, but how, how deep is it? A few miles. So, is there infilling? If there's material infilling it, is that the case? Well, so here's, here's what they say on, uh, uh, this article for impact cratering mechanics and crater morphology. So, "The depth of a crater is considerably less than the diameter. For example, simple craters on the moon have a depth-diameter ratio of 1.4 to 2.0." That's where we got it. "The diameter is 5 to 7 times greater than the depth. For complex craters on the moon larger than 20 kilometers, the depth-diameter ratio ranges from 0.1 to 0.05." That's what I was reading a moment ago. "The diameter is from 10 to 20 times larger than the depth." This is because of the slumping of the inner walls and formation to the central peak causing, uh, causes a shallower depth.

But here's where th this is this is what what I think is necessary here. This uh to understand strength of the of shock wave of the shock waves is so great that the rocks are subjected to enormous pressures. The interaction of the shock waves with the unconfined surface called a free surface is responsible for excavating the crater. After passage of the shock wave, the compressed rock snaps back along the free surface. This provide produces a tensional uh uh wave called a rarifaction wave. Okay.

It decompresses and fractures the rock, setting it into motion along the fracture planes. The net effect is to momentarily convert the rock into a fluid-like material that moves laterally upward and out a city growing excavation cavity. In the meantime, the projectile has been largely destroyed by the shock waves generated it. So you you have some rare faction that occurs to the earth or to the moon in this case. Yeah. So I think that's why especially with those larger craters you actually have a momentary uh rarifaction or it's I would use the word liquefaction but it would be incorrect but you have this moment of uh sand being shooken by just the the the intense slapback wave. Uhhuh. Uhhuh. Sure. And allows it to kind of settle. I've got a an aerial view of Meteor Crater. the famous one. Uh I think this is wrong. I think there's been some discussion and at one point uh it was dated to 26,000 years, but I think it's gone back to being closer to 50,000 years. But the age is not the important part here for this discussion. It's the ratio of uh width to depth. So you got three fifths of a mile. So 5,280 uh divided by 5 * 3 will give us 3,168 ft in diameter, right? And its depth uh what it say 600 ft deep. So we divide that by 600 and then we invert that. So we're looking at a point about 0.19 right here is the ratio. Fits right in right in the zone. Right. Yeah.

Now, let's look at some of these lunar craters like Mari Serenatus. Seren serenitatus, right? It's almost flat. I mean, and presumably it's a crater. And you got another one here, one of the mares. Um, here's Theophilus, which is this right here. And you can see the smaller craters. You can see here, they're they look just from visual appearance like they're fitting the ratio. And they've got central uplifts. There's no central uplift in Theophilos. And here's Alonso right here. Another view of Alonso. And look at this. Must be uh yeah, Tollameus, which is this is the lower left. So you've got Tollus, Alonsus, and then no, the Aristarus, Heroditus was next to Aristarus. So I don't know what this crater is up here. But look, what is striking me is that from this is that once you get to Alonsus, you're kind of at that transitional stage where diameter continue to enlarge. But it doesn't get any deeper. 0.05. So 5% to 10% of the diameter at that size. Uhhuh. Yeah.

In the book The Moon and the Planets, a catalog of astronomical anomalies by uh William R. Coralus uh in 1985. had a a a heading in there a uh a a contribution said entitled apparently anomalous long-term persistence of craters. Um, so he's talking here about quote an un an and apparently unresolved paradox. The science of realology rho log gy. The science of realology deals with the flow of solids under stress. Equations describing the deformation of solids under the influence of prolonged forces such as gravity are welldeveloped. That terrestrial rocks can deform in relatively short periods of time can be seen in the movements of salt and ice glaciers and the sagging of old tombstones under their own weight. The thrust of this article is that the moon's crater walls must flow like any other solid. In fact, after three or more billion years, the lunar craters should all but have disappeared. The unit of this. Oh, did you find a definition for realology? Just to help us get realology is the science uh that studies the flow and deformation of matter, especially materials that exhibit both solid and liquid characteristics. It focuses on how materials behave when subjected to forces, including their ability to flow, change shape, and respond to stress. Okay? Because I encountered the term quite frequently when I'm trying to understand the distribution of mass in the earth that takes place between glacial and interglacial transitions. Um, so this goes on the unit of viscosity and that's the you could say the sluggishness of of like if you have a glass of milk and a glass of molasses. The molasses is you pour them both out. The molasses can take much longer and slower because it has higher viscosity. Uh and the unit of viscosity is the poise pis right viscosity. So terrestrial rocks have viscosities well under 10 the 23rd poisons or poise poisons I guess. Uh so granite for example is 10 to the 20th poisonous. What? Look up poises for us. So it was uh poise is a measurement named after Jean Marie Po. Po I I guess is how you would say his name. It's a P O I S E UI L E. It is defined as uh the viscosity of a fluid where a sheer force of one dine that's dy ne per square centimeter is required to maintain a velocity difference of 1 cm per second between two parallel planes 1 centimeter apart. Okay. Okay.

So, we're talking here about viscosity um and how the unit of measure. We don't necessarily get into the uh scientific definition of a poise. Simply, it's just a unit of measure to determine how readily a material will flow under pressure, whether that's gravity or some other externally applied pressure. I would suppose since they're using uh granite as an example of 10 to the 20th poisons that would be granite tested in some a laboratory in some type of a machine that would uh determine at what point it reaches its elastic limit I'm guessing. Um, so the unit of terrestrial rocks have viscosities well under 10 the 23rd poises for example granite is 10 to the 20th poise by analogy to to terrestrial rocks uh lunar rocks should be under or the rocks composing craters should be under 10 the 23rd poisones also lunar basults for example are very much like terrestrial basults. So using the equations of realology, the lunar craters should be flattened by gravity in less than a million years if the viscosities of similar terrestrial rocks such as basaltt are used. Actually some scientists have have estimated the viscosity of the lunar crust at 10 to the 27th power poisons based on the assumption that the lunar crust solidified over 3 billion years ago. Uh in contrast the viscosity of the terrestrial mal mantle is usually taken as 10 the 22nd poisons. So this is a factor of 10 the 5th lower. So in other words, 10 to the 5ifth lower, what is that? That's going to be a 100,000. 100,000. So in other words, the the craters seem to be a 100,000 times more rigid than you would expect to find equivalent craters on Earth composed of the same material. I think that's what what this is telling us. That that's based on the dating metric. Mhm. So, what the heck is going on there? Either the dating metrics wrong or or the moon is very very hard. Very they're or they're new or they're new or they're new. They're newer than a million years. So, which again would be the dating metric would be there'd be something wrong with our current understanding of the moon. Something is not quite adding up here. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, then there's something else. Uh the size seismic signature of observed moonquakes. This is also now from the realm of terrestrial planets. Same book. The seismic signature of the observed moon quakes is very different from that of terrestrial earthquakes. Whereas seismic disturbances on Earth are damped out in a matter of minutes, the aftermath of lunar tremors persists for 60 to 100 minutes or even longer. Such long echoes can be caused only by an extraordinary amount of scattering of seismic waves in a highly fragmented surface layers. Uh about 20 km deep in which compressional waves propagate with a velocity of about 7 kilometers per second. Below approximately 60 kilometers, this velocity increases quite abruptly to 8.1 kilometers per second. Uh no doubt as a result of a corresponding change in composition. But I find this interesting. Now it's from and then remains the same from there down to at least a thousand kilometers. Uh uh so it says here long echoes. Echo. I'm thinking an echo. We're we're talking about echoes. Reverb baiting within within the moon. Echoes. How do you generate echoes? Have you ever been able to produce an echo? Yeah, you find somewhere where it's hollow and you speak into it, whether it's a canyon or a valley, somewhere where there's a lot of space and takes a while for that to come back. Back in the early 80s, I started a drum circle and my leading student, my old friend Jerry, who played in the band with us, he had a little shop uh outside in Atlanta. at a place called Little Five Points. And there were, you know, buildings. They were about two stories tall, but when there was no traffic, it you could actually get a an echo. And we discovered that when we were drumming, the the sound would be bouncing off the building across the street with this slight little delay, which was really cool because it was almost like you were playing with multiple drummers and you were syncopating your uh your drumming, right? But yes, I mean, the first thing that come to my mind, of course, is a canyon. We were where were we just on the tour? We were finding some echoes. Where was that? Was that It wasn't Bruno. It was the one right before Bruno with all of those wonderful rock uh rocky banks. It was I'm trying to remember. It was It was in the raptor preserve. Oh, and uh Wy, right? Wyatt. Wyatt. Wyatt was echoing. Yeeha or wahoo. Wahoo. Woohoo. Yes. Okay, that's right. Wyatt uh traditionally does that on every trip. We We hear hollering and whooping, echoing off in the distance. And we know WY. Wyatt. See, I got you doing it now. I'm sorry. Yeah. Wy Wyatt. So, okay. This is interesting.

However, an analysis of seismic data furnished by moon quakes with epicenters on the moon's far side has shown that for seismic events emerging from depths greater than 1,000 kilometers uh which is less than 700 km from the moon's center, sheer waves cease to leave any discernable trace in seismic messages recorded on the surface. So that must suggest that that zone uh from 700 kilometers which is what about 450 miles maybe from the center of the moon there's a zone in there where you have this echoing phenomena. Uh some would call that interesting worth exploring. Yeah. And here I have a graphic to show some of the seismic signatures of three lunar events recorded by Apollo 12 seismometer in 1969. The top event is the crashing of the lunar module. The two lower ones are caused by natural moon quakes. Look at that middle one. I mean that's just echoing and echoing on. Looks like I wish the what the horizontal axis is here. Okay. Oh, right here. What is that? 10 minutes. 10 minutes. Wow. So, this is uh looks like couple hours the thing is ringing. It's like you threw a rock on a on a tank empty like an empty diesel tank, you know, thousandgallon tank and it just was reverberating for hour. When you first said tank, I'm thinking like a Abrams tank in the middle of But I got you. Yeah. Think about like so we've got an a tank uh on on our property that's 1,000 gallons of diesel. Mhm. When that sucker is empty, you throw a rock on it. Yes. It'll it'll it'll sit there for two or three minutes. B. Yeah. I see. I remember that. Well, because at my grandparents house in Minnesota, they had a fuel tank in the basement. And exactly the same. I discovered as a little kid that, you know, when usually at the end of the uh winter when it was um pretty empty, I could go in there and I could bead on it and uh yes, it would echo and reverb bait. I definitely remember that very clearly. Um, so yeah, there we go. Uh what's going on here? Well, let's get back into some commentary to see if we can get some clues.

So the seismic phenomena just described leave and and you consistent with what you're you commented the seismic phenomena described leave no room for doubt that our initial assumption of a homogeneous moon cannot be true. It cannot be true in detail and that the internal density is likely to change with each change in the velocity of propagation of seismic waves. Now, let's pause for a minute. We talked about I think this was while we were recording the episode, right? That um if we look at a lunar rock from the surface was 3.34 gram per cubic centimeter, right? Maybe we I think I think we covered that on on So, go ahead and just rehash that really quick. Yeah. Okay, let's let's rehash that. So, let me back up a little here. Um uh next to its size that's the primary uh physical characteristic of the moon. But next to its size the second physical characteristic of the moon which is a fundamental importance for its structure is its mass. The mass of the moon like any that of any other celestial body which cannot be placed on our terrestrial scales can be determined only from the effects of its attraction on another nearby body of known mass. In the case of the moon, this has first been the earth and then in the more recent past different types of space probes. Now this is being written in 1979. The ratio of the mass of the earth to the mass of the moon uh of the earth moon masses was found from such work to be equal to 81302. So in other words the earth is 81.03 03 81302 times the mass of the moon or in round numbers it's 80 81 times as massive and since the mass of the earth is known that of the moon comes out to be 7.350 * 10 25th g or more than 73 trillion tons. Now, there's a uh a trivia for you. If you're ever in a trivia contest, John, and the question comes up, how much does the moon weigh? You can say, you can raise your hand. You can go 73 trillion tons. Got it. Wow. Okay. This is that in fifth grade. Yeah. This is the weight of our nearest celestial neighbor. And although it may loom incomprehensibly large for the reader accustomed to terrestrial weights and measures, on a cosmic scale, it only constitutes it constitutes only a relatively modest lump and nor is the mean density of the lunar globe unusual. Well, that we're going to recall some qualification in a minute. If we divide the lunar mass by its volume 2.199 * 10 25th cubic cm, we find that its mean density is equal to 3.34 g per cubic centimeter. So in other words 3.34 uh uh the standard is 1 g per cubic centime is water I think uh taken at I don't know probably what temperature room temperature I'm guessing uh that is and that's about the same as basaltic rocks in the earth's crust and st if you go out and you pick up a standard rock from the side of the road or side of a creek or river it's probably going to be right very close to that range 3.34 g per cubic cm or 3 and a third times more dense than water. Okay? Uh and it's going to be cons and here's the important point. It's going to be considerably smaller than the mean density of the terrestrial globe. So in other words, let's let's clarify what we're talking about here. You pick up a surface rock on the earth and it's going to have a mean density of around 3 and a third g per cubic cm which is a whole lot smaller than the mean density of the earth. Put in let's see what the what is the mean density mean density of the earth. Uh I'm going to guess it's what probably in the high 5 something close to six gram per cubic centimeter maybe 5.51. So right on 5.51 g per cubic. Now that's the mean density. So you figure surface 3.34 the center of the moon has to be a lot more dense in order for the mean density be to be 5.51. Okay. Yep. So if you pick up a rock on the surface of the earth, what you find is that it's its density is way less than the mean density of the earth. as a whole. Okay. Well, here's the problem with the moon. The mean density of the moon is about 3.34 gram per cubic centimeter. So, what would that imply? Well, would that imply then that the moon is homogeneous? See? Well, if you go and you if you dig a hole to the center of the moon and you start taking scoops of lunar material, well, if the mean density is the same throughout the whole mass of the moon is the same as the mean density of material you pick up on the surface, well, then do you assume that the uh that the that it's homogeneous, that it's the same material throughout? But that poses problems, doesn't it? Does that make sense if you go, "Oh, well then the very core of the moon is no denser than 3.34 gram per cubic centimeter." Does that make sense? Well, let's see. For the moment, it goes on. For the moment, let us abandon the global properties of the moon and turn our attention to its interior. The primary clues to its structure are already in our hands. Namely, its known mass and size combining an am mean density of 3.34 g per cubic centimeter. The average density of lunar rocks brought back from the moon between 69 and 72 by Apollo 11 through 17 missions ranges between 3.1 and 3.5 g per cubic centimeter. Just right in the range of terrestrial rocks. Well, this coincidence becomes even more convincing when we recall that densities of 3.1 to 3.5 g per cubic centimeter are those of their material at zero pressure, while the mean density of 3.34 g per cubic centimeter refers to matter compressed by self attraction. So here's here's what he's getting at. Well, what's doesn't seem to add up here is that of course the overall density of the moon is going to be the same as the surface of the moon which is uh material at zero pressure. So it's almost as if the whole composition of the interior composition of the moon is at what? Zero pressure. But that doesn't make sense because you've got matter compressed by self attraction. So now you got the law of gravity which would s completely seem to contradict the notion of a homogeneous moon. But there we go. So the moon is basically a very low density object. Uh so now what does that mean? Uh well, we found out that craters aren't obeying the laws that we would expect, right? Uh and then we have the seismic signature of observed moon quakes which suggest what? Paracity. All paracity. Porocity. Um so then now let's come back to this.

So the seismic phenomena described leave no room for doubt that our initial assumption of a homogeneous moon cannot be true. It cannot be true in detail and that the internal density is likely to change with each change in the velocity of propagation of seismic waves. Then here we get to the one of the the the perhaps the the the crux of the matter. We also possess irrefutable evidence that the distribution of mass inside the moon is not strictly radially symmetrical. A sufficient proof that the moon does not conform exactly to a spherically symmetrical model has been provided by the f familiar phenomena of synchronism between rotation and revolution of our satellite in brief by the fact that the moon continues to show us the same face. If its mass, now get this, this is critical. If its mass were distributed concentrically throughout its interior, its gravitational potential would be equivalent to that of a mass point. But if this were so, the terrestrial attraction would be powerless to exert any effect on its motion and the moon could rotate at any speed about an arbitrary axis. So that familiar synchronism between rotation and revolution what is called one one spin orbit coupling suggests that the moon is not behaving as radially distributed mass. Yet the moon's mass of 73 trillion tons is such that the realology of the moon should allow it to settle out to a radial distribution about its center of mass.

So coming back to the Apollo seismic experiment that the team that was conducting that experiment reported now this is from 1970. It's from the journal science. It's uh entitled missile impacts as sources of seismic energy on the moon. The Apollo passive seismic experiment team has recently reported first results from the impact of the ascent stage of the lunar module on the lunar surface as part of the Apollo 12 mission. Seismic energy from the impact was recorded by the seismometers deployed on the lunar surface by Apollo 12 uh astronauts as part of the implaced science station called the Apollo lunar surface experiments package. The impact experiments have emerged as an extremely powerful tool in the seismic exploration of the moon. The purpose of this report is to aid in the interpretation of the lunar impact signals by presenting seismic data recorded from missile impacts at White Sands Missile Range. Seismic signals from a total of five missile impacts were recorded between early 68 and 1969 at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. So what were the results of this experiments by looking at seismic signals at white sands missile range compared to the results of impacts on the moon. The lunar module impacted 70 75.9 kilometers from the Apollo 12 lunar seismic station in the sea of storms. The signal recorded by the long period vertical component seismometer is strikingly different from that of the missile impact signals, the ones at uh White Sands. Hm. Well, we were kind of starting to suspect that, weren't we? As described by Laam at al the duration of the lunar module impact signal is extremely long approximately 55 minutes in comparison with the missile impact signals which uh at a range of 79.9 kilometers would have lasted several mi minutes at most. The LM or lunar module impact wave has a very emergent beginning builds up slowly to a maximum over a period of 6.8 8 minutes and then gradually decreases in amplitude. The attenuation of seismic waves that propagate through the outer regions of the moon is extremely low compared with the attenuation observed for propagation through the crust of the earth. As one hypothesis to explain the unexpected character of the lunar module impact signal, Laam and others suggest that the moon not only has a high Q or quality factor. We don't need to get into what that is, but it is also very heterogeneous. What is the definition of that term? Something that's composed of different components. Not homogeneous but heter not homogeneous genius. Yes, very heterogeneous. The nature of this heterogeneity, if indeed this interpretation of the data is correct, has important implications relative to the origin and evolution of the moon. The complete lack of similarity between the lunar impact signal and the signals from the missile impacts reported here supports the view that the structure of the moon in the vicinity of Apollo 12 landing site is radically different from the typical crustal structure of the earth. This is from AE Ringwood 1979. The origin of the Earth and Moon.

So what do we know now about the structure of the moon from lunar seismoggrams? Well, we certainly could not take any chances when it came to providing the necessary sources for the lunar seismic network. If the moon were totally inactive seismically, we would have to generate some large artificial seismic sources ourselves and rely on these to probe the moon. Fortunately, it did not take much energy to adjust the trajectories of the discarded Saturn 5 third stage boosters in order to guide them towards pre-selected impact points on the lunar surface. But these were not the only artificial projectiles to be used as seismic sources. After the landing phase, each lunar module ascent stage was jettisoned and crashed onto the lunar surface as soon as its two astronauts had safely transferred back to the orbiting command module. But boosters and spent lunar modules have not been the only projectiles to hit the moon in recent years. There have also been several large meteorite impacts, several of which occurred at considerable distances from the seismic network, some even on the far side. So, how thick is the lunar crust and of what does it consist? Well, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of all lunar seismoggrams is that they last for so long. In some cases, seismic waves are still being recorded a full hour after the first primary wave arrived. In other words, the moon rings like a bell when it is struck. Ring a bell? Does that ring a bell, John? H I remember these. And that's not just any bell, is it? No, that's the Liberty Bell. That is the Liberty Bell. Yes. I touched it back when they still allowed you to get near it. Oh, really? Yes. Uh-huh. So, it really does have a crack in it, doesn't it? So if there were carbon gases or water vapor, some such thing being generated inside the Liberty Bell and you closed off its bottom, it would probably come out that crack, wouldn't it? Probably would. Y Mhm. Okay. So that's a replica of the 1976 commemorative bsentennial silver dollar. I thought that was interesting little juxiposition. Yes. Yeah, don't beat around the bush. What exactly are you saying? I'm Hey, I'm just taking note of uh the moon.

Now, the next thing we need to explore is maskcons. And I think we should save that for the next episode. I think so. Do you know what a maskcon is? A mass. So, okay. M A S C O N. Okay. I don't a mass. It's a It's a contraction of mass concentration. Got it. Uhhuh. And where we'll leave it is that mass concentrations were discovered in the early days of exploring the moon in preparation for the Apollo landings. Uh and so they sent up uh a series of lunar orbiter missions uh that and this was written in 1968. Okay. Uh it appeared in the journal science masscon lunar mass concentrations. Uh so the lunar orbiter missions have provided both high-quality photographs of the moon and supplementary scientific information concerning the gravitational field of the moon. Uh previous investigators have concluded that the moon was gravitationally rougher than anticipated. Uh this roughness of the moon has been of interest to the Apollo project because of the resulting perturbations on the trajectory of the Apollo orbiting spacecraft. For these reasons, a new analysis has been done with the use of the accurate tracking data received here by the NASA deep space network operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We now report that this new processing of the lunar orbiter data has produced unexpected results. So, we'll pick it up there on the next episode of Squaring the Circle. Thanks for joining me, John. And thanks for joining me, all of you folks that have been listening in. Uh, please do check out the visuals that John will be posting. And uh, feel free to make comments. And on that note, I have not much more to say. John, how about you? Nope. All good. All good. All right, my friend. Thank you much. Until next time. Yes, sir. [Music]