Abstract
Maria formed when impact basins were filled with basaltic lavas. Fractures in the lunar crust, which served as channels for lava flows that were located in the crustal/mantle interface, were created by collision energy. Although basins were produced in minutes by asteroid impacts, the slow inundations by the low-viscosity basalts (about the consistency of motor oil), took several hundred thousand years to fill the basins. Generally, maria exhibit dark, low-albedo characteristics of cooled basalt lava. The relative absence of craters in maria is partly the result of the fluidity of the maria lavas and their unrelenting flow for thousands of years as well as the impact and obliteration of the target areas caused by kinetic energy of the asteroids impacting the Moon.
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Handy, R., Kelleghan, D., McCague, T., Rix, E., Russell, S. (2012). Sketching Maria (Seas). In: Sketching the Moon. Patrick Moore's Practical Astronomy Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0941-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0941-0_2
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