Moonquakes have been found to have triggered landslides on the lunar surface, according to new research from the Smithsonian and the University of Maryland, raising new concerns about safety in long-term moon habitation.
The study, as reported in a new paper, focused on the Taurus-Littrow valley, where Apollo 17 landed on the moon in 1972. New models for moonquakes employed in the study overturn previous ideas that meteor impacts were the primary cause of lunar topography shifts.
Apollo 17 Samples
“We don’t have the sort of strong motion instruments that can measure seismic activity on the moon like we do on Earth, so we had to look for other ways to evaluate how much ground motion there may have been, like boulder falls and landslides that get mobilized by these seismic events,” explained co-author Nicholas Schmerr.
Smithsonian Senior Scientist Emeritus Thomas R. Watters and University of Maryland Associate Professor of Geology Nicholas Schmerr performed the study, analyzing samples collected from the Apollo 17 landing site. Over fifty years ago, those NASA astronauts collected pieces of boulders from falls and landslides to return to Earth. Working on those samples decades later, the pair estimated the strength and likely sources of ancient moonquakes.
Effects of Moonquakes
The scale and environment of the Moon are significantly different than those of Earth. For those reasons, although the quakes were relatively minor by Earth standards, with a magnitude of 3.0, they were still able to have a significant impact close to their sources. According to the scientists, the Moon’s Lee-Lincoln fault, which stretches through the Taurus-Littrow Valley, has shaken many times in the last 90 million years and may still be active.
“The global distribution of young thrust faults like the Lee-Lincoln fault, their potential to be still active and the potential to form new thrust faults from ongoing contraction should be considered when planning the location and assessing stability of permanent outposts on the moon,” Watters said.
According to the pair’s calculations, a moonquake significant enough to cause notable damage has a one in 20 million chance of occurring on any day in a location close to an active fault.
“It doesn’t sound like much, but everything in life is a calculated risk,” Schmerr noted. “The risk of something catastrophic happening isn’t zero, and while it’s small, it’s not something you can completely ignore while planning long-term infrastructure on the lunar surface.”
Preparing for Safe Lunar Missions
As risks accumulate over time, the likelihood of encountering dangerous moonquakes increases, and scientists note that long-term lunar missions face significantly higher chances of encountering such events than Apollo 17’s brief sojourn. The pair notes that the design on some future missions, such as the Starship Human Landing System, has higher aspect ratios, increasing their vulnerability to moonquakes and upending their stability. The team cautions that these newly discovered risks must be taken into account for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish long-term moon habitation.
“If astronauts are there for a day, they’d just have very bad luck if there was a damaging event,” Schmerr added. “But if you have a habitat or crewed mission up on the moon for a whole decade, that’s 3,650 days times 1 in 20 million, or the risk of a hazardous moonquake becoming about 1 in 5,500. It’s similar to going from the extremely low odds of winning a lottery to much higher odds of being dealt a four of a kind poker hand.”
With the increasing use of monitoring technology, Schmerr believes that moonquakes are a viable and important new area for study. He especially warns of the dangers inherent in scarps, the sharp slopes or cliffs created by fault lines, and high ground with an unsteady foundation.
“We want to make sure that our exploration of the moon is done safely and that investments are made in a way that’s carefully thought out,” Schmerr said. “The conclusion we came to is: don’t build right on top of a scarp, or recently active fault. The farther away from a scarp, the lesser the hazard.”
The paper “Paleoseismic Activity in the Moon’s Taurus-Littrow Valley Inferred from Boulder Falls and Landslides” appeared on July 31, 2025, in Science Advances.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.