Watch out Yosemite — the moon has its own impressive rock display.
An enormous chunk of granite, measuring roughly 50 kilometers wide, may be buried beneath the lunar surface, researchers reported July 5 in Nature. Finding such a behemoth, by far the largest granite structure spotted beyond Earth, is a surprise given that forming this type of rock typically requires plate tectonics or abundant water.
When Apollo astronauts landed on the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, they encountered vistas dominated by basalt. The igneous rock is run-of-the-mill stuff on both the moon and our planet, says Matthew Siegler, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. “Everything starts as basalt.”
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