Earth's current inventory of nuclear weapons would not be sufficient to create the two canyons on the Moon, according to David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. Kring and his team estimate that more than 130 times the energy stored in all known nuclear warheads was needed to produce these impacts. Kring and his team used photos and data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to map the area and calculate the path of debris that produced these canyons about 3.8 billion years ago. They reported their findings Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.?

Earth's current inventory of nuclear weapons would not be sufficient to create the two canyons on the Moon, according to David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. Kring and his team estimate that more than 130 times the energy stored in all known nuclear warheads was needed to produce these impacts. Kring and his team used photos and data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to map the area and calculate the path of debris that produced these canyons about 3.8 billion years ago. They reported their findings Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.?