Burial Depths of Lava Flows on the Moon
A study of lunar radar datasets and their ability to decipher locations of "cryptomaria".
The "maria" are the dark regions we see when we look up at the Moon.
These are ancient lava flows that erupted early in the Moon's history and have since cooled into a dark rock called basalt.
"Cryptomaria" refers to ancient lava flows on the Moon that have since been buried and thus are hidden under the surface.
In this study, we set out to use radar data to probe the subsurface and map these buried, ancient lava flows.
We studied a region called Schiller-Schickard, which is to the southwest of the big patch of visible surface maria on the near-side of the Moon.
And we used several different data sets to do this.
We find that areas with surface basalts (the mare) show decreased radar backscatter values.
This is due to the absorption of the radar signal by the minerals in the basalts.
However, the areas that have reduced radar signal often extends beyond the boundaries of known surface maria.
Plot showing the burial depth vs. how much radar signal is returned for different areas of the Moon.
We can therefore use the reduction in radar signal to map how deeply buried they are.
This allowed us to create a map of volcanism across the entire region.
Map of volcanism across the Schiller-Schickard Region. Colors indicate how deeply buried the lava flows are.
