Hundred million year old moon boulder rolls

Wouldn't higher gravity make the boulder less likely to roll? Seems counter intuitive to me.

I have a problem with the premise of this article. Not that a huge boulder on the moon was moved by forces unknown, but that scientists claim to know it is 100 million years old. How was it dated? Did Apollo astronauts/robotic rovers go up to it, break off a sample, and test the ratio of Argon isotopes to see how long since it was belched from a moon-volcano? (See Wikipedia Article on Argon dating methods for the exact techniques)

My favorite "conspiracies" involve the idea that human history goes back further than mainstreamers admit, and that huge stone ruins etc are dated to the Common Era (and very precisely, but based on the current native people's known history.) But I digress... I would just have much more respect for a scientist or institution that had the stones (pun intended) to admit they just don't know who old something is, who built it or how it go there.

On a side note, this sort of reminds me of how they discovered gushing water on Mars by photographing the same place twice on different orbital passes. Forces definitely at work here, if only forces of nature.

reply to post by purplemonkeydishwasher


Please put the pipe down and think about what you just said for a moment.

Oh no the moon rocks are invading! I'm confused about one thing though, if the moon has low gravity wouldn't that mean that a moon rock would have an easier time rolling around?

Nice catch Johnsequit- I always get mildly annoyed with myself for not thinking to question such statements of curiousness - getting better at it, but anyho: There's been trails like this in a number of the Moon pics I've seen, and the gambit runs from it being evidence that we were there, to alien or black government mining ops to eliciting no recognition/explanation from TTS (Those That Should, in this case, explain such things). But if you've ever seen pics of Mars' moon Phobos - my goodness it's like it has little bolder elves that float a few feet above the surface sticking a stick in the dust while the other elves spin the little moon like mad!

As much as I enjoy (and am inclined to believe if I'm honest) that there really IS some group of humans and/or other personages from interesting places, and that any surface activity is bound to be discovered any day now if it hasn't already (thus the need for Underground bases, just like here on Earth - sure, could be The Elite planning for an ELE but could also be TPTB and Military just plain ol' irritated to popping a blood vessel that any activities above ground and outside can be seen by just about anybody nowadays!) - that this could very well have a mundane explanation. Dull, but possible.

Does anyone remember those floating or sliding stones that pop up from time to time on mystery shows and strange phenomena lists and whatnot, the ones out in the desert that have long trails behind them? I think someone was going to put a camera on them or something but not sure if they ever did, being all in the middle of nowhere, but it does seem like such things can and do happen (and if anyone else brought this up on a previous page I apologize - didnt read all the pages before posting this). Was there ever a confirmed cause of how these move? I remember one theory being the desert wind on the slick level ground after a rare rain, but the rocks were big, far too big for any wind less than a tornado to push them, or seems like it anyway.

But yeah, ' totally believe there's somebody on the moon. Blacks Ops Bases, Mining Operations, Various Alien Species using the old "Labs of the Gods" as a hotel stop over with a voyeuristic watch-the-clueless-hybrid-mooks on the orb below who were engineered to be too stupid to realize the obvious (but how'd they miss the "being a slave is fun! gene???), etc , etc. :-) Don't know if they leave tracks, but I'm still sure they're there.

reply to post by johnsequitur1221

The age of the boulder tracks is explained this way, and mind you they aren't offering an age of the bolder itself, just when it moved.

however, this boulder's journey was made in geologically recent times. Studies suggest that regolith development from micrometeorite impacts will erase tracks like these over time intervals of tens of millions of years. If rate estimates are accurate, this boulder track might not be older than 50-100 million years. Eventually its track will be erased completely. What might have caused the rock to roll so recently? Perhaps this boulder was sent on its way by ground-shaking caused by the violence of a nearby impact. Perhaps a direct hit by a small meteoroid did the job.

The confusion of exactly what was attempted to be aged may have been caused by how the tread title is worded.
They offer no guesstimate of the age of the rocks.

reply to post by Ophiuchus 13


More Mass = More Momentum

reply to post by Brainiac


But is it not that those big rocks on the moon have almost equal weight as small rocks here on earth, because of more gravitational pull?

WTF!

The ones that change trajectory are weird but...THE ONES THAT DON'T ARE EVEN WEIRDER!

Look at the ones that cross over a small crater...they keep going in the same direction not a skip, not a change of course, not a stop because IT JUST FELL IN A HOLE???

Ok I am little bugged out on this one! Great find!

Still think you need to do one one image where it passes through a crater and keeps going that bends my head! Ok so it could be cause how old they are...and the impacts happened after the roll...but BUT what if they didn't?

reply to post by abeverage


And what if they did?

I showed the converging slopes, the links discuss them. I don't get the mystery, the off the wall analyses, the incomplete picture of what may have really occurred. Is there one image of where a trail started from on this thread? It could be 10's of 50's of miles away from where we see the trails end. There could be gaps over miles wide from bounces of violent impact touchdowns, these end of track rollers could have been hit by ejecta from a hundred miles away 100 million years ago, we don't see the whole picture obviously.

reply to post by abeverage


there's really something strange going on! the external text I wrote at the top came from NASA I rechecked it at the site, to my recall it was written in exact order, but now its gone...

reply to post by abeverage

Look at the ones that cross over a small crater...they keep going in the same direction not a skip, not a change of course, not a stop because IT JUST FELL IN A HOLE???

That I think can be explained, maybe because the crater happened afterwards the boulder passed?

Originally posted by 0bserver1
reply to post by Brainiac

 

But is it not that those big rocks on the moon have almost equal weight as small rocks here on earth, because of more gravitational pull?

edit on 21/12/2010 by 0bserver1 because: (no reason given)

Mass and Weight are not the same thing!

Well, mass is a measurement of how much matter is in an object; weight is a measurement of how hard gravity is pulling on that object. Your mass is the same wherever you are--on Earth, on the moon, floating in space--because the amount of stuff you're made of doesn't change.

More in simple terms here.

www.colorado.edu...

Look people this is soooo common for someone who studies planets. EVERYONE of those "rolling rocks" is nothing more then a meteor impact. Ever skimmed a stone on the water? The trajectory of these meteors allowed them to skim and roll across the surface before coming to a final resting spot. Nothing to see here. There are no grey men pushing these rocks around in a game of lunar bocce.