{"id":93485,"date":"2026-08-08T10:09:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T14:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=93485"},"modified":"2026-08-08T10:09:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T14:09:38","slug":"moonquakes-reveal-hidden-ice-beneath-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-and-science\/moonquakes-reveal-hidden-ice-beneath-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Are Using Moonquakes to Find Hidden Ice"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>7 Minute, 16 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

The moon looks like the stillest place in the solar system. No wind, no rain, no rustling leaves \u2014 just gray dust and silence. But it turns out the moon has been quietly rumbling this whole time, and scientists just figured out how to use those tremors to find something that’s been hiding underneath it for billions of years.<\/p>\n\n

It’s called a moonquake, and researchers just discovered they can use it to map something no camera, rover, or orbiter<\/a> has ever been able to see directly: frozen water buried hundreds of feet beneath the lunar surface.<\/p>\n\n

What a Moonquake Actually Is<\/h2>\n\n

Earthquakes happen because our planet has an active core, shifting tectonic plates, and a lot of geological motion. The moon has almost none of that. It’s smaller, colder, and geologically quiet compared to Earth. But it still shakes \u2014 from meteorite impacts, from the extreme temperature swings between lunar day and night that cause rock to expand and crack, and from deep, slow-building stress inside the moon itself.<\/p>\n\n

NASA first picked this up decades ago, when the Apollo missions left seismometers on the lunar surface that recorded thousands of moonquakes through the 1970s. For a long time, that data mostly told scientists about the moon’s internal structure \u2014 what it’s made of, how it’s layered. Nobody was using it to go treasure hunting.<\/p>\n\n

That just changed.<\/p>\n\n

How Scientists Turned Tremors Into a Map<\/h2>\n\n

A research team led by Dr. Nicholas Schmerr at the University of Maryland, working with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Hawaii, published a study in the journal Science Advances<\/em> on July 31, 2026, showing that seismic waves move differently through frozen ground than they do through dry, loose lunar soil.<\/p>\n\n

That difference is the whole discovery. Frozen soil is denser and stiffer, so a seismic wave passing through it speeds up and changes shape in a measurable way. Dry regolith \u2014 the moon’s version of dirt \u2014 doesn’t behave the same way at all. By reading those differences the way a doctor reads an ultrasound, the team modeled ice deposits buried as deep as 2,625 feet \u2014 about 800 meters \u2014 under the moon’s permanently shadowed polar craters, without ever drilling a single hole.<\/p>\n\n

Those polar craters matter because they never see sunlight. Some haven’t been touched by direct light in billions of years, which means anything frozen inside them has likely stayed frozen the entire time \u2014 including water ice that could have arrived on comets and asteroids long before anything was alive to notice.<\/p>\n\n