Fiery volcanic eruptions on the moon had led to formation of water and ice - study

Our perception of a volcano is reddish fire and destruction, which is conditioned by the images of molten lava wreaking havoc on human settlements and animal habitats. Yet, there is more to volcanoes than that, as pointed out by a report in sciencenews.org which states that a new study suggests how two billion years ago such volcanic eruptions on the moon led to water vapour becoming ice on its poles.

The details of this study have been reported in the Planetary Science Journal of May month.

The presence of ice on the moon was confirmed in 2009 and since then it has been argued as to how it came into being on the moon. The options discussed included comets, charged atoms carried by the solar wind, asteroids or that it originated on the moon itself because of eruptions in volcanoes between 4 to 2 billion years ago.

Planetary scientists from University of Colorado, Boulder Andrew Wilcoski observed: “It’s a really interesting question how those volatiles [such as water] got there. We still don’t really have a good handle on how much are there and where exactly they are.”

Along with colleagues, Wilcoski started the study by looking at the viability of volcanism as a source of lunar ice. At the zenith of lunar volcanism, the eruptions took place once every 22,000 years. Based on the assumption that H2O constituted about a third of volcano-spit gasses, as deduced from the ancient lunar magma samples, scientists worked out the eruptions had set free more than 20 quadrillion kilograms of water vapor in total. Interestingly, this is equal to 25 Lake Superiors.

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