basalt tagged posts

The first lunar rocks brought back to Earth in decades show the Moon was volcanically active more recently than previously thought, Chinese scientists said Tuesday.

A Chinese spacecraft carried lunar rocks and soil to Earth last year—humanity’s first mission in four decades to collect samples from the Moon, and a milestone for Beijing’s growing space program.

The samples included basalt—a form of cooled lava—from 2.03 billion years ago, scientists found, pushing the last known date of volcanic activity on the moon closer to the present day by as much as 900 million years.

Analysis of the samples “reveals that the Moon’s interior was still evolving at around two billion years ago”, the Chin...

This is image shows modern Mars (left) dry and barren, compared with the same scene over 3.5 billion years ago covered in water (right). The rocks of the surface were slowly reacting with the water, sequestering it into the Martian mantle leading to the dry, inhospitable scene shown on the left.
Credit: Jon Wade

Water on Mars absorbed like a sponge, new research suggests. 2 new articles have shed light on why there is, presumably, no life on Mars.  IAlthough today’s Martian surface is barren, frozen and uninhabitable, a trail of evidence points to a once warmer, wetter planet, where water flowed freely – and life may have thrived. The conundrum of what happened to this water is long standing and unsolved. However, new research suggests that this water is now locked in the Martian rocks.

Sc...

A team from US, France, U.K. is reporting data sent back by Mars rover Curiosity suggests Mars may have once had a continental crust similar to Earth. They describe 20 rocks that had been probed by the rover, and why their findings suggest a different history for the planet than has been thought. Researchers believe they have found evidence that suggests that rather than a lack of magmatic planetary activity, which should have been evident in rock samples showing mostly basalt, rock samples are full of silica and have a rich composition.

The light-colored rock samples are from an area inside the Gale Crater (in the southern hemisphere near Mount Sharp) and have been dated back to approximately 3.6B years ago...