The Lee-Lincoln Scarp: A Young Moon Fault at the Apollo 17 Landing Site

The Lee-Lincoln scarp is a low ridge, or step, about 80 meters high, running north–south across the western end of the Taurus-Littrow valley — where Apollo 17 landed on the Moon. A NASA Goddard visualization flies over it.

A fault in the lunar crust

The scarp is a lobate scarp: the surface expression of a relatively young, low-angle thrust fault. As the Moon's crust contracted, the ground on the west side of the fault was pushed up and over the east side.

Still moving?

In a May 2019 paper in Nature Geoscience, Thomas Watters and colleagues presented evidence that this fault, and others like it, are still active and producing moonquakes today.

• Seismometers left by Apollo astronauts recorded hundreds of events between 1969 and 1977, including 28 shallow moonquakes.
• By narrowing down where those quakes struck, the team found that many occurred near scarps — suggesting that the forces that built the scarps also caused the quakes, and are still reshaping the lunar surface.
• The Lee-Lincoln scarp lies only about 13 kilometers from one of the quake epicenters they identified.

The only one ever visited

On their second day on the Moon, the Apollo 17 astronauts drove their lunar rover onto the scarp. It remains the only scarp on another world that humans have visited.

Sources

Based on "Lee Lincoln Scarp at the Apollo 17 Landing Site," NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; a work of the United States government in the public domain.