Why are the craters on the moon named as oceans? There isnt any water. :confused: Is it because if there was they would be oceans? But if thats why thats silly because there isnt and wont be, at least for a long, long time.

Any ideas or knowledge on why?
:bugeye:

"Why are the craters on the moon named as oceans? There isnt any water. Is it because if there was they would be oceans? But if thats why thats silly because there isnt and wont be, at least for a long, long time.

Any ideas or knowledge on why?"

The people who first observed the Lunar 'Seas' (or 'Maria' as they are called in Latin) thought the Moon was a lot like Earth; indeed, even in the 19th century there was the occasional newspaper report that astronomers had seen living things, including humanoid savages, through their telescopes! This was not an unreasonable deduction to make, especially since the science at the time seemed to indicate the same things that were happening here on Earth (like gravity) were also occuring everywhere else in the universe. Thus, the people who mapped the Moon-mainly Renaissance scientists using (by our standards) primitive telescopes-deemed the darker areas through the scopes as 'seas.'

Although by the turn of the 20th century most scientists were aware that the Moon didn't contain any surface water, the composition of the 'seas' was still rather mysterious. Later spectroscopic studies and direct sampling showed the 'seas' were made of a dark volcanic rock called basalt; a rock very common on the terrestrial planets where shield volcanism occurs. On Earth, basalt occurs around volcanoes like those in Hawaii and in the huge-mid ocean ridges where lava wells up from the mantle and sets the oceanic crust in motion.

The consensus today is that the Moon's 'seas' were probably originally big impact basins that later filled in with basaltic lava welling up from the Moon's mantle. When the Moon's internal heat source died out some 2 billion years ago, the seas 'froze' into their present form, and have been modified very little since.

Oh, that makes sense :) Thanks