NASA-funded research has found that moonquakes tied to the Moon’s slow contraction can shake far wider stretches of the lunar surface than scientists previously recognized, raising new questions about seismic hazards in the very regions where astronauts may soon land. The findings carry direct implications for the Artemis campaign, which targets the lunar south pole for crewed missions. Because no modern seismometers have operated on the Moon since the Apollo era, the conclusions rest on a combination of decades-old data, orbital imagery, and computational modeling that together paint a more active picture of lunar geology than most planners assumed.
A Shrinking Moon and the Faults It Creates
The Moon has been cooling and contracting for hundreds of millions of years, and that slow shrinkage generates real structural damage. As the interior loses heat, the crust buckles along contractional thrust faults, where one slab of rock is forced up and over an adjacent slab. These fault scarps, some stretching for kilometers across the surface, are not relics of a dead world. They are geologically young, and the shallow moonquakes they produce can be surprisingly strong and long-lasting compared with what most people associate with seismic events on Earth.
A peer-reviewed paper in Nature Geoscience connected Apollo-recorded shallow moonquakes to young thrust-fault scarps mapped in imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. The authors developed an epicenter-relocation approach designed for the sparse Apollo seismometer network and found multiple shallow quake epicenters clustering near mapped fault scarps. NASA’s own release at the time noted statistical arguments against coincidence, meaning the spatial overlap between quakes and faults is unlikely to be random. That finding shifted the scientific conversation: the Moon is not just tectonically interesting in a historical sense but seismically active right now.
South Pole Shaking Zones and Potential Artemis Landing Sites
The stakes sharpened considerably when researchers turned their attention to the lunar south pole, where NASA has said it aims to send Artemis crews. A study published in early 2024 modeled where strong shallow moonquake shaking could occur in and near candidate landing regions. The Planetary Science Journal paper found that the south pole regions are subjected to global stresses resulting in contractional deformation and associated seismicity, and that steep slopes there are susceptible to regolith landslides. Permanently shadowed craters, prized because they may harbor water ice, sit on some of the most vulnerable terrain.
This is where the headline promise lands hardest. Most earlier assessments of Artemis landing safety focused on terrain slope, lighting, and communication geometry. Seismic risk was treated as a secondary concern, partly because the Apollo seismometers operated hundreds of kilometers from the south pole and partly because the Moon was long considered geologically quiet. The new modeling flips that assumption. Thrust faults form where contractional forces break the crust and push rock on one side up and over the other, and the resulting ground shaking can extend kilometers away from the scarp, according to NASA’s release. That reach means a fault that looks safely distant on a map could still rattle a landing site or habitat.
Apollo Evidence of Ancient Landslides
If the modeling seems abstract, physical evidence from the Apollo 17 site in the Taurus-Littrow valley makes it concrete. A peer-reviewed study in Science Advances used Apollo 17 field observations, returned samples, boulder tracks, and the light mantle landslide deposit, combined with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery, to back-calculate the ground accelerations needed to set those boulders rolling. The results point to multiple coseismic slip events, meaning the valley experienced repeated shallow moonquakes strong enough to send rocks tumbling down slopes and trigger landslides over meaningful distances.
That finding matters because it converts a theoretical hazard into a documented one. Planners can no longer treat moonquake-triggered landslides as a low-probability edge case. The boulder tracks at Taurus-Littrow are physical proof that shallow quakes have reshaped terrain in the geologically recent past, and there is no reason to think the south pole would be exempt from the same forces. If anything, the south pole’s steeper topography and loosely consolidated regolith could make it more prone to slope failure when shaking occurs.
The Moon’s Persistent Seismic Background
Shallow quakes tied to contraction are not the only seismic signals on the Moon. Apollo seismometers recorded deep tidal quakes, meteoroid-impact quakes, and thermal quakes driven by the extreme temperature swings of the lunar day-night cycle, as catalogued by NASA Science. A Caltech-led study applied machine learning to the old Apollo data and found that certain moonquakes occur every morning and afternoon like clockwork, driven by thermal expansion and contraction of the surface as sunlight arrives and departs. That regularity suggests the Moon’s seismic environment is far busier than a handful of dramatic shallow events.
The gap in the data is worth acknowledging directly. No modern seismometer has operated on the lunar surface since the Apollo instruments were switched off in 1977. Every current conclusion about moonquake frequency and intensity relies on those recordings, supplemented by orbital imagery of fault scarps and computational models. That means scientists are forecasting seismic risk with an instrument network that covered only a small fraction of the Moon and never sampled the polar regions at all, a limitation that feeds directly into how conservatively Artemis planners must think about site selection, structure design, and contingency procedures.
Designing for a Moving, Multi-World Program
NASA officials have framed Artemis not as a one-off set of landings but as the first phase of a long-term exploration program that treats the Moon as a proving ground for deep-space operations. That mindset pushes engineers to design habitats, power systems, and mobility assets that can tolerate shaking, landslides, and regolith slumping without catastrophic failure. Experience from terrestrial engineering in quake-prone regions on our own planet offers a starting point, but lunar gravity, vacuum conditions, and the abrasive nature of regolith demand new testing regimes and safety margins tailored to the Moon’s particular hazards.
Seismicity also intersects with broader goals in planetary science. By studying how a small rocky body cools, contracts, and fractures, researchers refine models that apply not only to the Moon but to other airless worlds across the solar system. The same physics that drive thrust-fault formation on the Moon likely influence the crustal evolution of Mercury and some large asteroids, while comparisons with tectonic processes beyond our neighborhood, across the wider universe, help scientists place Earth’s active geology in context. In that sense, every moonquake recorded and every fault scarp mapped feeds a much larger story about how rocky worlds live, cool, and crack over billions of years.
As NASA prepares to return humans to the lunar surface, it is also investing in new ways to communicate these evolving scientific insights to the public. Streaming and on-demand content from platforms such as NASA+ and curated series highlighted in the agency’s programming lineup give audiences a front-row view of how discoveries about moonquakes, shrinking crusts, and polar ice shape mission design. These outreach efforts sit alongside more traditional news releases, including earlier briefings that described how a contracting lunar interior could be generating ongoing seismic activity, helping bridge the gap between technical journals and public understanding.
All of this underscores a simple but easily overlooked point: the Moon is not a static backdrop for flags and footprints but a dynamic world that continues to evolve. The same forces that wrinkle its surface and jolt its crust will be at work when Artemis astronauts step onto the regolith, deploy new instruments, and build the first semi-permanent outposts near the south pole. By taking moonquakes seriously now—folding seismic modeling into landing criteria, designing infrastructure with generous safety margins, and deploying modern seismometer networks as early as feasible—mission planners can turn a potential hazard into a scientific asset. Each tremor recorded in the coming decades will not only test the resilience of human-made structures, but also deepen our understanding of how a small, cooling world continues to move beneath a deceptively still gray surface.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
