PSRD: Age Rules

The ages of rocks from the lunar highlands vary widely, even for a single rock sample. This makes it difficult to quantitatively test ideas for early lunar differentiation and formation of the crust. Lars Borg and Amy Gaffney (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and Charles Shearer (University of New Mexico) have devised a set of guidelines to apply to geochronological data that leads to a relative ranking of the reliability of the age determined for a sample. Applying their guidelines to existing data for lunar highland rocks shows an upper limit on rock ages between 4340 and 4370 million years. This is essentially the same as the so-called model ages of the formation of KREEP (a chemical component enriched in potassium, rare earth elements, and phosphorous) and of the formation of the deep source regions that melted to produce mare basalts. The numerous ages close to 4370 million years suggests a complicated and protracted cooling of the primordial lunar magma ocean or a widespread vigorous period of magmatic activity in the Moon.