The Moon is Contracting and Creating Thousands of New Faults

Thomas R. Watters, a scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, led the research published in The Planetary Science Journal. By examining seventeen years of orbital imagery, the team determined the Moon is losing radius at a rate of 6 to 11 centimeters per million years. While this pace is slower than the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates, the structural implications for the lunar surface are distinct.

Unlike Earth, where seismic activity concentrates along plate boundaries, the Moon functions as a single-plate body. This creates an unbroken shell where cooling-induced stresses can trigger moonquakes anywhere across the surface. These shifts manifest as lobate scarps—small, cliff-like wrinkles in the crust—which now number in the thousands. For NASA and other agencies planning long-term installations like the Artemis base, these widespread, unpredictable faults represent a critical engineering challenge that must be integrated into site selection and infrastructure design.