A team of scientists led by Thomas Watters announced in the August 20, 2010 issue of Science that the Moon is shrinking. According to their paper, the radius of the Moon has decreased by about 100 meters in the last billion years or less.

Watters' team studied images of the Moon's surface made with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). The astronomers studied geologic features on the Moon known as lobate scarps with the LROC. Scarps are cliffs caused by fault lines or vertical movement of the crust. Lobate scarps are curved and are indicative that the Moon or planet is shrinking.

The planet Mercury, whose surface is very similar to the cratered highland areas of the Moon, also has many scarps indicating that Mercury has shrunk. Mars also has scarps. The lunar scarps are smaller scale structures than the scarps on Mercury or Mars. Scarps on Mercury or Mars can be more than a kilometer high and extend for hundreds of kilometers. Lunar scarps are less than 100 meters high and a few dozen kilometers long at most.

The Apollo missions imaged scarps near the Moon's equator, but did not study the entire Moon. The new LROC images discovered 14 new scarps distributed over the entire Moon. The global distribution indicates that the Moon is shrinking globally.

Astronomers estimate the age of geologic features on the Moon by the number of craters. More heavily cratered areas are geologically older. The lunar scarps are the youngest tectonic features on the Moon and are less than a billion years old. The scarps most likely formed from the stress on the surface as the Moon contracted, and their scale indicates that the Moon's radius has decreased by about 100 meters.
The Moon has shrunk by about 100 meters in less than the last 1 billion years. Why?

The Moon was hot and molten when it first formed. The Moon gradually cooled and solidified. The lunar interior, while not as hot as Earth's interior, is still warm. So the Moon continues to cool and shrink slightly as it cools.

So what you're trying to tell us is that in a few bazillion years, this woman will someday be right?  :o :o :o

http://duhpursuit.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/elephantsmoon.jpg

My plan is working!  In another 3 billion years, the moon will be the size of a basketball and there will be no more tides on Earth, thus I will destroy your climate, your crops, your sea life, and your commerce!  That will be your downfall, wretched humans! Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!
http://www.thefastlanetomillions.com/attachments/off-topic-discussion/1757d1276027815-waste-time-thread-professor_chaos.jpg

The moon is seismically dead.  The Earth is not.  However, the Earth's core is cooling, therefore it must be contracting too, though at a much slower rate than the moon.

We'll be dead in 6 trillion years anyway.

We'll be dead in 6 trillion years anyway.
I know that I will be by then.

We'll be dead in 6 trillion years anyway.


REALLY -- OH NOES!!!

Oh, 6 trillion years, I thought you said 6 billion.  Few!  I couldn't deal with that.
:D

six billion reminds me of how much money is wasted on NASA every year!

let the moon shrink...its old....my grandfather shrank.......

what i don't understand is how they made enough cheese to create a moon and why it doesn't melt when the sun hits it.

six billion reminds me of how much money is wasted on NASA every year!

let the moon shrink...its old....my grandfather shrank.......


My grandfather was a shrink...and a shrank...and now he's all gone!

sorry to go off topic but this reminds me that one of my favorite 1950's sci-fi movies is "the incredible shrinking man"

So what you're trying to tell us is that in a few bazillion years, this woman will someday be right?  :o :o :o

http://duhpursuit.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/elephantsmoon.jpg


Ha ha, karma.  ;D

This is a 'sun is eventually going to go out' situation. We will be long-dead before we know whether it's an issue or not.