#geologic map

Because of the time represented by this basin, rocks from it cover the proposed “Snowball Earth” events and provide some of the best examples of glacial processes. Those rocks are then followed by rocks from the Ediacaran period, the time just before the Cambrian when multicellular, animal life existed on Earth, but without hard parts that are easy to fossilize. In fact, the Ediacaran hills are just southwest of the area covered by this satellite image collected by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel Satellites. This is a false-color image. Different minerals and different rocks are absorbing light at different wavelengths, and those absorbances are being assigned to colors that we can see. Thus, we’re using infrared light to be able to distinguish one rock from another, one layer from another. While the rocks don’t look like this in the field, the image itself would be extremely useful because this is basically a broad-scale geologic map, collected from space. You can even make out areas of active sediment cover at the western side. The original image would be large enough to print and hang on a wall. -JBB Image credit: ESA https://flic.kr/p/2jrAweP

Overall at the scale they’re working with, they have characterized 203 separate units across the Moon. Some of them are visible here – such as distinct lava flows inside large craters or the deposits ejected out from inside the more recent craters. Symbols on this map also include wrinkle ridges, faults, and folds, where the upper layers of the Moon have been deformed by some process. Finally, this section on the lunar nearside includes the marked landing sites of various probes and spacecraft that have touched down in this section. The full map of the entire moon can be downloaded at the link below, but the pdf version is 712 megabytes in size. A version can also be downloaded for opening in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. -JBB Source: https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/search/map/Moon/Geology/Unified_Geologic_Map_of_the_Moon_GIS