[HN Gopher] Scientists discover recent tectonic activity on the ...
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       Scientists discover recent tectonic activity on the moon
        
       Author : bookmtn
       Score  : 64 points
       Date   : 2026-02-17 19:13 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (phys.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
        
       | whycome wrote:
       | "Recent"
        
         | dotancohen wrote:
         | Yes, in terms of lunar geography 1 billion years is recent.
         | Most lunar features formed 4 billion years ago.
         | 
         | Were the Winter Olympics recent? Not to the E. coli living in
         | your gut.
        
           | TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
           | The _Late Heavy_ , as I like to call it. Sounds like a Drum
           | and Bass producer. Anyways:
           | 
           |  _The Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), or lunar cataclysm, is a
           | hypothesized astronomical event thought to have occurred
           | approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years (Ga) ago,[1] at a time
           | corresponding to the Neohadean and Eoarchean eras on Earth.
           | According to the hypothesis, during this interval, a
           | disproportionately large number of asteroids and comets
           | collided into the terrestrial planets and their natural
           | satellites in the inner Solar System, including Mercury,
           | Venus, Earth (and the Moon) and Mars.[2] These came from both
           | post-accretion and planetary instability-driven populations
           | of impactors.[3] Although it has gained widespread
           | credence,[4] definitive evidence remains elusive._
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment
        
             | gus_massa wrote:
             | IIUC "recent" in this article means 124 million years ago.
             | 
             | This is after the meteorite killed "all" the dinoraurs.
             | 
             | Also, North America was joined to Eurasia, South America to
             | Africa, Australia to Antartica, and India was a huge island
             | in the middle of the "Indic" ocean.
             | 
             | Am I right?
        
               | niloc132 wrote:
               | The meteorite believed to have killed the dinosaurs was
               | about 66 MYA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2
               | %80%93Paleogene_e... - which is more recent than 124 MYA.
        
             | antonvs wrote:
             | The Late Heavy Bombardment has increasingly been called
             | into question.
             | 
             | Here's one article about it:
             | https://phys.org/news/2016-10-apollo-era-evidence-late-
             | heavy...
             | 
             | The "definitive evidence remains elusive" from your quote
             | is probably a hint: the LHB was a result of getting carried
             | away extrapolating from the Apollo samples due to an early
             | dearth of data, not a real phenomenon.
        
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