When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; Psalm 8:3
"Rocks returned from the U.S. Apollo and Russian Luna missions
many
years ago gave ‘dates’ of about 4 billion years for the lighter-coloured
highland rocks. In their evolutionary framework, this is roughly when
the moon formed.
The darker, large impact craters on the moon’s near side are believed
to have formed not long after this. These are called ‘maria’ (Latin for
‘seas’) since they are filled with dark basalt (cooled lava), which
flooded them with magma from underground, released by the impact as
lava. Some of that basalt was also dated, but it gave ‘only’ 3.8 to 3.1
billion years.
This is a conundrum. One would expect that the basalt, which erupts
quickly, would rapidly fill the crater soon after impact. From the
dates, however, they were forced to assume that the eruptions continued,
forming fresh basalt, for almost a billion years after the impact.
The conundrum has intensified since Chinese scientists recovered basalt rocks from the maria, part of an estimated 2,000 km
that erupted from the moon’s mantle.
They ‘dated’ it at around two
billion years. This means that the eruptions must have continued for
some two billion years after the impact.
Q: But how can that be?
The moon’s small size means any internal heat would have long since
cooled in that time, solidifying the magma. The moon’s mantle also has
very few heat-producing radioactive elements, so radioactivity cannot be
invoked as a solution.
The simple alternative is that the moon is young, as the Bible indicates." CMI
