Moon’s Axis tilted by five degrees three billion years ago due to Volcanic Activity

The Earth’s Moon, in a surprising development, likely shifted its axis three billion years ago due to violent lunar volcanoes. The axis shifted slowly and possibly over a period of one billion years.

Shedding light on this phenomenon, a new study has suggested that following these volcanoes, one side of the lunar surface was heated up, which led to a change in the mass and structure of the space rock’s insides and ultimately caused the Moon to tip over onto its current axis.

The Moon tilted about 5 degrees on its own axis slowly over the course of maybe a billion years, causing the north and south poles to migrate by about 125 miles.

The study has been published in Nature. Planetary scientist Matt Siegler, who co-authored a paper that describes the event, informed, “You always take some things for granted — that the north pole of the moon has always been the north pole of the moon. There are some things that you don’t really realize can change”.

Siegler says the rare planetary event is called “true polar wander” and it is perhaps a new thing to look at in planetary science. But at the same time, he says, it seems to be a potential answer for a lot of strange things seen on planets. People had sort of thought about it as voodoo science for a long time.

The position of water-ice at the Moon’s poles, which formed sometime before the Moon’s orientation changed, also helped the researchers arrive at this conclusion. The researchers say as such, it is clear that some of the Moon’s ice is from the early years of the Solar System, which is thought to be 4.5 billion years old. It would be like the Earth’s North Pole going to Greenland, said Siegler.