Computer Simulation Explores Why the Moon's Far Side Looks So Different

CNET points out the far side of the moon - the one that never faces earth - is "rugged, spotted with tons of craters" and "filled with totally different elements." "In essence, our moon has two faces, and scientists are still trying to solve the mystery of why they're so different."But a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances might finally have an explanation for one major aspect of this enigmatic lunar duality. It has to do dark shadows, a massive impact many billions of years ago, and... lava.... They used computer simulations to see what might've gone on long, long (long) ago, way before there was any volcanic activity on the moon's surface. More specifically, they re-created a massive impact that, billions of years ago, changed the base of the moon, forming a gigantic crater that we now refer to as the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.... What they found is that this huge smash would've created a plume of heat that carried a bunch of specific chemical elements to the near side of the moon, and not the far side. "We expect that this contributed to the mantle melting that produced the lava flows we see on the surface," Jones said. In other words, those elements presumably contributed to an era of volcanism on the lunar face we can see from Earth but it left the far side untouched.

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