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Two Grand Canyon-size valleys on far side of the moon formed within 10 minutes
- EDEdDNEdDYFaN 2y agoextremely misleading headline implies that it just happened.
- Trias11 2y ago[flagged]
- 52-6F-62 2y agoNo it doesn’t. English is as algorithmic as math. If there is a formula x = x^1 + y you wouldn’t say ; no good it implies z is also the same. You would not because it says nothing about z.
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y agoIf you have a specification for a program saying "input: variables x and y, output: z holds x+y", you would probably be annoyed if someone coded "x=0; y=0; z=0", though. Just playing devil's advocate, I think the headline is not bad (could be less ambiguous, but sacrificing brevity)
- 52-6F-62 2y agoFigured someone would have to get specific. Lol. Have you read The Overstory? I recommend it, it’s a great modern novel. “What they do?”
- yathern 2y ago> English is as algorithmic as math Ain't no way! This "illogical" double negative shows how English is not at all like algebra. English is not a set of formal rules - there is no formal authority on the language. The rules that exist are derived from how English is commonly used - descriptive rather than prescriptive. This is why dictionaries are constantly adding new (sometimes annoying) words, and the Chicago Manual of Style is on its 18th version. For example, I was taught that "they" could never describe a singular person, and one should assume "he", "she" or "the suspect". Not so anymore [1]. The language, its constructs, and implicit rules are always changing, regardless (and irregardless[2]) of how you criticize those that speak it. [1] https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/help-tools/what-s-new.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/help-tools/what-s-new.h... [2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/irregardless https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/irreg...
- 52-6F-62 2y ago[flagged]
- gosub100 2y ago[flagged]
- 52-6F-62 2y ago[flagged]
- andrewfromx 2y agoYeah I could say: "Wall Street Loses 14% Within 10 Minutes of Opening Bell" (1929 Crash) "Radio Broadcast Causes Mass Panic Within 10 Minutes" (1938 War of the Worlds)
- oxygen_crisis 2y agoYou're somewhat exaggerating the effect, the headline uses past tense and your comparisons don't.
- berkes 2y agoMisleading? Or just misintepretable? Misleading implies the author tries to lead you to a wrong conclusion. The article is very clear about what it really means. I immediately read the headline as "it happened in a time span of 10 minutes probably a gazillion years ago". So in any case, it's not misleading to everyone, and therefore certainly not "extremely misleading".
- autoexec 2y ago> Misleading implies the author tries to lead you to a wrong conclusion. Why on earth would anyone assume that this clickbait title wasn't intended to be clickbait? What history of non-clickbait headlines would make anyone assume good faith on the part of CNN here?
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoJust because someone makes a wrong assumption about a headline doesn't mean they have to come here and tell everyone else about it.
- nashashmi 2y agoIt is missing a verb: “were” formed
- Fricken 2y agoReading is an act of guessing. I guessed that if the moon had recently been impacted that hard we would be hearing about it from more than CNN, and likely would have known about it in advance. I don't feel as though I have been mislead.
- iRomain 2y agoFunnily enough I went to the article because I guessed that it would have literally formed overnight by some surface movement originating from within the moon not some external cause. And I believe my guess is as good as yours except in hindsight of course.
- panzagl 2y agoNeal Stephenson fans are already heading to the salt mines.
- RandomBacon 2y agoSeveneves in case anyone wants to read it. I thought it was okay, certainly captivating enough for me to finish it.
- distrill 2y agoI thought it was quite good, although maybe it should have been a series rather than a single book. That might have given Stephenson time to flesh out the end, which felt a bit rushed.
- janalsncm 2y agoIt is impossible for a headline to give you all of the details of an article. If you feel “tricked” into reading an astrogeology article, I would suggest you might be one of the people who should be reading it.
- dotancohen 2y ago> astrogeology English needs a better term for this field. I understand that Astrology is already taken, but astro- (stars) geo- (earth) logy (study) is just wrong. Maybe Exolithology? Or Lunology, if these processes are unique to smaller bodies. Actually, our moon does have a differentiated core (I think the only one in the solar system) so per that argument we're a double planet (also the fact that the moon never has retrograde motion relative to the sun, another unique feature of our moon in the solar system) and thus just Geology is a proper enough name.
- autoexec 2y agoNo one said they were "tricked" by the article, only that the found the headline to be misleading which is entirely fair because it is a clear example of clickbait.
- stronglikedan 2y agoIt didn't imply that. You inferred that. Big difference.
- polotics 2y agoless clickbait title would begin with: "millions of years ago..."
- simonebrunozzi 2y agoBillions
- thunkingdeep 2y agoBillions is technically also millions… not the parent commenter, just thought I’d be a nit
- kamikazeturtles 2y agoBy that logic, you can also say seconds ago...
- gcanyon 2y ago"10^17 seconds ago..."
- IanCal 2y agoThis is why my go-to estimate for many things where the result is outlandishly large is "at least six".
- dinesh213 2y ago[dead]
- antonmarsh 2y ago[dead]
- rob74 2y ago> “Nearly four billion years ago, an asteroid or comet flew over the lunar south pole, brushed by the mountain summits of Malapert and Mouton, and hit the lunar surface,” Kring said. “The impact ejected high-energy streams of rock that carved two canyons … in less than 10 minutes.” For comparison, it took 5 million to 6 million years for water to erode the landscape of Arizona to create the Grand Canyon. Well yeah, it sounds perfectly reasonable that two wildly different mechanisms of producing a crack in the surface of a celestial body would also work on wildly different timescales. I mean, the crater itself (which is even bigger than the "canyons") also formed within 10 minutes or less, but that doesn't sound so spectacular, because all impact craters are formed this way.
- opello 2y agoFrom the Nature article[1], despite being prominent in the abstract it's almost a throwaway in the body: > ... Moon’s Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck were carved by streams of impacting rock in less than 10 min. and earlier in the same article: > Flight times of debris producing the 270 km-long main canyon are 4.9 to 15.0 min for Vallis Schrödinger over the entire range of potential ejection angles, with canyon-forming secondary impacts occurring within a 5 min interval. Flight times of debris producing the 280 km-long main canyon are 5.2 to 15.4 min for Vallis Planck over the entire range of potential ejection angles, with canyon-forming secondary impacts occurring within a 5 min interval. I didn't dig all the way into how we get 10 minutes from 4.9-15 minutes. I was very interested in how this time was so confidently bounded. I'm guessing it's the graph that charts impact sizes, distances, and energies to assume flight travel time from a point of impact. I'm also annoyed at the shift from "min" to "minutes" during the article. That just seems like really bad editing. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55675-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55675-z
- chr 2y agoThen, the ejected debris that created the canyons likely soared over the lunar surface and then collided with it at speeds of about 2,237 miles per hour (3,600 kilometers per hour). Oddly adding a veil of precision to an estimate of a kilometre per second.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bena 2y agoYeah, they just did the conversion and slapped it on there. Should have said "about 2200 mph".
- JoshTriplett 2y agoIt's unfortunate that the only written mechanism we have for expressing a lack of precision is scientific notation, which tends to be obfuscating for numbers at this scale: if you write "3.6e3 kph (2.2e3 mph)", you make it clear approximately how much precision you do and don't have, but it's less obvious-at-a-glance for the target audience of an article like this.
- carlmr 2y agoOr use kps and not lose additional precision every time you translate units?
- GaggiX 2y ago(3.8 billion BC)
- mykowebhn 2y agoTouché
- berkes 2y agoBC? 3.8 billion + 2024 is still just 3.8 billion.
- BurningFrog 2y ago"BC" is shorter than "ago"
- GaggiX 2y agoMy comment is meant to be humorous (while still being informative) because the title is misleading.
- DougMerritt 2y agoBut 3.8 billion A.D. is far in the future.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ReptileMan 2y ago>The energy unleashed that created the canyons was 1,200 to 2,200 times more powerful than the nuclear explosion energy once planned to excavate a second Panama Canal, the study authors estimate. Sometimes I miss that crazy boldness of the beginning of the Cold war era - imagination, engineering prowess and just a sprinkle of pure insanity.
- jerf 2y agoIf it wasn't for the radioactive fallout, it wouldn't have been a bad idea. It took time to understand how bad the fallout was. And perhaps ultimately, we came to an overestimate of how bad it is for various reasons... people are generally unaware that about 500 surface nuclear bombs have been set off for testing, and I think a lot of people would think that that is already enough to render Earth uninhabitable or something. (Although over the course of decades, not all in one construction project.) From a strictly rational perspective it is probably something that could be done reasonably, but, the world is what it is.
- seanw444 2y agoThe tests are very pretty to watch though. I'm very grateful they were recorded.
- jandrese 2y agoEven without the fallout you're still looking at a nuclear winter just from blowing all of that rock dust into the atmosphere.
- ReptileMan 2y agoI think that you don't have fallout. You dig charges deep, the goal is to make huge caverns that you collapse and are filled with water? This is how I would do it anyway.
- andrewflnr 2y agoRock is not very compressible. The cavities created by underground nuclear tests aren't that large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_nuclear_weapons_testing#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_nuclear_weapons_te... . They did get surface subsidence, but maxing out at a scale of "over half a mile", and not terribly deep. To create "huge caverns", that volume still has to go somewhere, and when you're talking about vaporized rock that mostly means atmosphere or nothing, more often the latter. But at least they didn't always get fallout, that's nice.
- andrewflnr 2y agoIt would be really cool if they explained why the erosion was so concentrated in those two particular directions, instead of generally peeling back the surface or even lots of smaller streams in all directions. Why the asymmetry?
- layer8 2y agoLarge pieces of debris, I’d assume.
- abecedarius 2y agoI guess a very shallow angle of impact was part of it: > brushed by the mountain summits of Malapert and Mouton
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sharpshadow 2y ago“…giant backhoes that have dug up the lunar surface and exposed material from underneath…” That’s indeed compelling to get rock samples from. Maybe it would be even possible to see different layers of moon inside those canyons, but afaik the whole moon is covered in dust isn’t it?
- thenthenthen 2y agoSchrödinger impact basin…mmmmm
- LightBug1 2y agoSo what. I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters.