angelinegragasin

The highest mountains of the moon are thought to have been formed by the ejecta of these collisions, rather than through tectonic or volcanic activity. These thousand kilometer-wide holes filled with flows of molten basalt that hardened to create the relatively smooth oceans of darkness (maria) visible from Earth with the naked eye. The few extinct volcanoes to be found on the moon are only a few hundred feet high. Because gravity on the moon is a sixth of what it is on Earth, the lava that once flowed from them traveled long distances rather than heaping up at the eruption source, as Nasmyth imagined.

less