UNM Researchers Find No Water In Moon's Mantle Raising Questions

A lot of you here on ATS are interested in the Moon and personally I am fascinated by it. In fact I was surprised to find it doesn't have its own forum with all the mystery surrounding it. Recently there have been threads about how there IS water on the moon. A new study and first of its kind has shed some light on the mystery of does the Moon have native water?


news.unm.edu...’s-mantle/

from the Aug 5th 2010 article:

"And it’s true, water has been detected on the moon’s sur­face through remote sens­ing. How­ever, researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico, UCLA, Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin and Los Alamos National Lab­o­rotary, have taken a deeper look within the Moon’s man­tle and the results tell a dif­fer­ent story. Their find­ings were pub­lished today in a Sci­enc­ex­press Report titled, “The Chlo­rine iso-tope.com­po­site of the Moon and Impli­ca­tions for an Anhy­drous Mantle.”

more:

"Sharp and his col­leagues, includ­ing Research Pro­fes­sor Chip Shearer from UNM’s Insti­tute of Mete­orit­ics, used a gas source mass spec­trom­enter to mea­sure chlo­rine iso­topic com­po­site of lunar basalts and vol­canic glass beads col­lected dur­ing the Apollo mis­sions and given to UNM by John­son Space Center.

“The only way to explain the results was that the mag­mas had no water in them,” said Sharp. “We con­cluded that large chlo­rine iso­topic vari­actions can only be explained if there’s no hydro­gen in the rocks. Iso­topic anom­alies in lunar sam­ples have been seen in other element­tal sys­tems, but never with the extreme vari­a­tions observed for the chlo­rine iso­topes. What makes chlo­rine unique is its hydrophilic affin­ity and high ivolatility.com­pared to all other iso­topic sys­tems stud­ied in lunar samples.”

Assuming these results prove that the bone dry moon didn't come from the 70% wet Earth then where is the moon from? Jeff Taylor, Ph.D., Prof. of Planetary Science, Univ. of Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, Honolulu, Hawaii believes that moon is mostly made of the massive object that is believed to have impacted the newly forming Earth some 4.5 million years ago. This would explain why some scientists date the moon as 20-30 million years younger than the Earth because the object believed to have impacted the Earth which is now believed to have originated somewhere between Earth and Mars was 20-30 million years younger than Earth. In other words the moon is mostly the impact object debris that formed into the moon. This would explain other differences in the composition of the Moon and the Earth such as the moon rocks are much richer in ferrous iron, oxidized iron, than Earth rocks. Mind boggling but I think this could solve the mystery surrounding the origins of the moon.


[edit on 28-8-2010 by Overtime]

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[edit on Sat Aug 28 2010 by Jbird]

Originally posted by Overtime
to mea­sure chlo­rine iso­topic com­po­site of lunar basalts and vol­canic glass beads col­lected dur­ing the Apollo mis­sions
[edit on 28-8-2010 by Overtime]

I don't think the "young Aussie genius" would agree that the volcanic stuff was collected during the Apollo missions and after reviewing the thread about him posted in this forum I'm leaning more in the direction of the genius.

reply to post by soleprobe


Only one problem with that.

Where did the samples come from? They cannot have come from Earth.

Originally posted by Overtime


Where did the samples come from? They cannot have come from Earth.

Why not?
............

reply to post by soleprobe


Because the samples are hydrogen free.

You should click on the article link for more on this

Originally posted by Overtime
reply to post by soleprobe

 

Only one problem with that.

Where did the samples come from? They cannot have come from Earth.

Oh, boy! More mystery! Does this not allow that the Moon came from much, much further away? Surely, they know from examining meteorite samples if it is even likely the Moon comes from within the orbit of Jupiter, and if not, is the stars the upper limit? just wondering....

a) a Moon forum is an absolutely brilliant idea. Please press it with the owners of the site. It makes a lot of sense!

b) shaky argument on many levels in the OP. We need to wait for more, and more recent data to come to any semblance of a conclusion.

reply to post by Aliensun


Exactly Aliensun, the impact object came from far away and then the debri field became moon

reply to post by buddha system


That's cool B, we can wait and see what else is uncovered

This new info suppports that the moon is not earthly.