The Source of Water Ice on The Moon Could Be Traced to a Seemingly Unlikely Source

There is not a lot going on at the Moon. There is dust. There is rock. The basalt plains are the product of extensive volcanism.

We have recently discovered that there is water. There is a lot of water. Bound up in the moon. A person is trapped in volcanic glass. It can be hidden in craters at the poles that are permanent shadows, where the heat of the Sun can't make a difference.

It's not clear where this water might have come from. New research suggests that there has been a process on the Moon in the past called volcanoes.

The amount of water that fell back down to the surface from the volcanic outgassing of the ancient Moon has been questioned by planetary scientists. It seems that the answer is yes.

A team of researchers led by planetary scientist Andrew Wilcoski wrote that their model suggests that around 41 percent of the total H 2 O mass could have formed as ice in the polar regions.

The volcanically active period of the early Moon would have been accompanied by short-lived, collisional atmospheres that enabled the efficient sequestration of large quantities of water ice at the poles.

The Moon used to be a hot mess. The plains of volcanic rock that you see when you look at the full Moon are from a period of large-scale volcanic activity that may have begun as early as 4.2 billion years ago and lasted until about 1 billion years ago.

The most volcanic body in the Solar System is Jupiter's moon Io, which has over 400 known volcanoes.

Clouds of volcanic gases, mostly carbon monoxide and water vapor, would have been included in the eruptions. Transient atmospheres around the Moon could have dissipated into space. What if some of the water didn't evaporate in the solar wind, but settled like frost?

They used an average massive eruption rate of around once every 22,000 years. They studied the rate at which volcanic gases escaped into space, compared to the rate at which they settled on the lunar surface.

Roughly 15 percent of the water settles on the lunar nightside and forms a frost over the course of 1,000 years. Over billions of years, enough ice could have remained to make up a significant portion of the ice that remains today.

It will not be easy to find. It may be buried under the lunar surface. Some water could have remained on the surface at lower latitudes long enough to interact with minerals found there, or captured in volcanic glass that is re-melted in meteorite impacts.

Evidence for past water has already been found on the Moon, so we can start looking for evidence for ancient volcanic Moon frosts. Science is rad.

The research was published in a journal.