Word: lavas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Holes & Meteors. The apparent scarcity of seas on the far side of the moon will keep moon experts theorizing for many years. The seas are really flat, low plains filled with dust or lava. They must have been formed rather late in the moon's history, because few meteor craters pit their surfaces. Astronomer Gerard Kuiper of the University of Chicago thinks that the seas were made by the impact of asteroids up to 90 miles in diameter, which blasted great holes in the crust at a time when the moon's interior was hot and plastic. Dark...
...nearby moon made the earth rotate more slowly. This made the moon spiral outward. As it moved, it crashed into the lesser satellites, each of them blasting an impact pit in its surface. The bigger pits punched through the moon's crust and were filled with lava from the molten interior. The biggest satellite of all, about 100 miles in diameter, hit the present site of the lunar plain called Mare Imbrium-the right eye of the "man in the moon...
Nobel Prizewinner Harold Urey of the University of California at La Jolla, another leading moon authority, agrees with Kuiper about there being lava on much of the moon's surface, but he does not think that it welled out of a molten interior. Instead, he contends, it was formed on the spot by the energy of great meteors that hit the moon and melted both themselves and the local lunar rock. He thinks that the present surface material may be something like sand or gravel...
...Gold agrees that the moon was pockmarked long ago by large meteors, and it may have been built up entirely by such accretion. But he does not think that the smooth, dark areas that are called maria (seas), because early astronomers thought they were exactly that, are filled with lava. He thinks that they are low places full of fine dust that was removed by a kind of erosion from the moon's highlands. In some places it may be more than a mile deep...
...Labor Secretary, López Mateos lived quietly in a two-story, eight-room house on the outskirts of the capital's fancy suburb-on-a-lava-field, Pedregal. The house, made of glass and lava stone, is furnished with nude marble statuettes, alabaster floor lamps, overstuffed furniture in shades of purple and rose. The López Mateos' only child, Evita, 16, studied at Torrington Park, an English school for middle-class girls, in Arundel, West Sussex, learned flawless English (her father, fluent in Spanish and French, can read English but does not speak...