The Moon has its own “Grand Canyon of the Colorado”, and doubly so. Only these two canyons were not caused by the slow erosion of a river like the Colorado: 15 minutes of destruction were enough to leave these two enormous scars on the surface of the Moon.
10 minutes of destruction. A 2025 study analyzed in detail two enormous geological strips located in the vicinity of the south pole of the Moon. The analysis has determined, among other conclusions, that they were formed by the impact of an asteroid or comet and that the impact was such that these canyons were formed in less than 15 minutes of destruction.
Two large cannons. Their names are Schrödinger Valley and Planck Valley and they are two enormous geological strips that radiate in a straight line from a point located in the Schrödinger basin, near the lunar South Pole, not far from the place chosen by NASA to the return from humans to the Moon.
The study has offered us new data on the magnitude and morphological characteristics of these two sores on the surface of our satellite. These two canyons have a length of 270 and 280 kilometers; and 2.7 and 3.5 kilometers deep, respectively.
An immense force. In addition to analyzing the characteristics of these two strips, the study tried to characterize the impact that caused them. By studying the way in which these were excavated, they determined that the process lasted between 4.9 and 15 minutes in one of the cases and between 5.2 and 15.4 minutes in the other. That is, they only needed about 10 minutes so that the impact would destroy tons and tons of lunar rock.
The impact would have been enormous. According to the team responsible for the study, the energy required to produce these cannons would have been 700 times greater than the energy released by the nuclear tests of China, the United States and the USSR, and 130 times greater than the energy in the world inventory of nuclear weapons.
Details of the study, like this last one, were published in an article in the magazine Nature Communications.
The best analogue of the Chicxulub crater. The impact would have occurred billions of years before the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth. However, the team responsible for the study maintains in their article that this lunar impact is the “best analog expression on the surface” of the Chicxulub crater.
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Image | NASA\SVS\Ernie T. Wright
A version of this article was published in February 2025
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