[Rockhounds] A first look at rocks from the lunar farside create a volcanic mystery

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

The first samples from the farside of the moon contain signs of surprising
volcanic activity near the lunar south pole.

Two separate analyses of lunar rocks brought to Earth by China’s Chang’e-6
spacecraft show the rocks formed from cooling magma relatively recently,
about 2.8 billion years ago, according to papers published November 15 in
*Science *and *Nature*. The measurements may help solve the mystery of why
the moon’s farside is so different from its nearside, but also raise new
questions about the history of lunar volcanism.

The moon’s two faces are like night and day, with different topography,
chemical composition, crater density and evidence for volcanism. Huge
solidified pools of lava called mare cover almost a third of the nearside.
But only about 2 percent of the farside shows signs of flowing lava.

“The enigmatic asymmetry between the nearside and the farside of the moon …
is a long-standing unresolved conundrum,” geochemist Qiu-Li Li of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and colleagues write in *Nature*.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/first-look-rocks-lunar-volcanic-mystery