Newly Discovered Moon Tunnel Could be Perfect Place for Colony

The 'supermoon' over Heho, in Myanmar's Shan state. (AFP / Ye Aung Thu)
The 'supermoon' over Heho, in Myanmar's Shan state. (AFP / Ye Aung Thu)
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Newly Discovered Moon Tunnel Could be Perfect Place for Colony

The 'supermoon' over Heho, in Myanmar's Shan state. (AFP / Ye Aung Thu)
The 'supermoon' over Heho, in Myanmar's Shan state. (AFP / Ye Aung Thu)

At the close of the Apollo age, a year before the final moonwalk in 1972, a NASA researcher argued that vast tunnels lie beneath the lunar surface.

There was good reason to think so. Lava from ancient volcanoes might have bored miles-long voids beneath the moon's surface, just as volcanoes formed the Kaumana lava tubes in Hawaii.

What a sight a lunar lava cave would be. Protected from meteors and radiation that bombards the surface, the tunnels might preserve evidence from the moon’s early history and clues to its mysterious origins. And many scientists have long dreamed of building bases inside natural moon caves, where lunar explorers might sleep safely in inflatable homes, protected from the storms above.

But the lava tunnels of the moon, like the mythical canals of Mars, proved elusive.

NASA’s Ronald Greeley hypothesized in 1971 that one of the great channels in the moon’s Marius Hills region might in fact be a collapsed tunnel. But he admitted that no mission had yet photographed a lunar cave entrance — and some doubted they even existed.

Half a century after Greeley’s paper was published and NASA left the moon behind, in a paper published this week, Japanese researchers say they've found proof of the tunnels no one could see.

Japan calls its Kaguya orbiter the “largest lunar mission since the Apollo program.” It was launched in 2007 with state-of-the-art instruments, deployable satellites and a mission to solve the great mysteries of the moon’s origin.

In 2009,Kaguya drifted 60 miles above the Marius Hills and took a picture of a large, deep hole.

Holes aren’t unusual on the moon’s pockmarked surface, but a NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter managed to get a follow-up shot, closer to the ground, as a team of Japanese and American researchers recounted in Geophysical Research Letters last week.

“The floor of the hole extended at least several meters eastward and westward under a ceiling of two other holes,” the researchers wrote — like the mouth of a tunnel.

But the murky picture revealed no more. Did the cave go on for miles, like the hypothetical lava tube, or dead-end just out of sight?

It took years to find out. The Japanese got another assist from the United States in 2011, when NASA put twin spacecraft — Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL — in orbit around the moon.

GRAIL measured tiny fluctuations in the moon’s gravity to map out mountains and subterranean features. When it flew over the Marius Hills, the researchers wrote, it detected something long and hollow beneath the surface  — extending more than 30 miles from the hole Kaguya found.

So Kaguya swung back into action. The Japanese probe blasted radar waves down onto the suspected tunnel, listening for anomalies in the echoes that came back from underground.

Over and over, Kaguya heard a distinctive pattern of echoes. The researchers think it is either the floor or ceiling of a cave — the long-hoped-for lava tunnel.

If the researchers are correct, it sounds just like what the old Apollo scientists and would-be colonists were looking for.

“Their existence has not been confirmed until now,” Junichi Haruyama, one of the paper’s authors, told Agence France-Presse. And now that he knows the tunnel exists, he said, he looks forward to finding out what’s inside.

The Washington Post



New T-Rex Ancestor Discovered in Drawers of Mongolian Institute

A life reconstruction of the newly identified dinosaur species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which lived 86 million years ago in Mongolia, is seen in this handout illustration released on June 11, 2025. (Julius Csotonyi/Handout via Reuters)
A life reconstruction of the newly identified dinosaur species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which lived 86 million years ago in Mongolia, is seen in this handout illustration released on June 11, 2025. (Julius Csotonyi/Handout via Reuters)
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New T-Rex Ancestor Discovered in Drawers of Mongolian Institute

A life reconstruction of the newly identified dinosaur species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which lived 86 million years ago in Mongolia, is seen in this handout illustration released on June 11, 2025. (Julius Csotonyi/Handout via Reuters)
A life reconstruction of the newly identified dinosaur species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which lived 86 million years ago in Mongolia, is seen in this handout illustration released on June 11, 2025. (Julius Csotonyi/Handout via Reuters)

Misidentified bones that languished in the drawers of a Mongolian institute for 50 years belong to a new species of tyrannosaur that rewrites the family history of the mighty T-Rex, scientists said Wednesday.

This slender ancestor of the massive Tyrannosaurus Rex was around four meters (13 feet) long and weighed three quarters of a ton, according to a new study in the journal Nature.

"It would have been the size of a very large horse," study co-author Darla Zelenitsky of Canada's University of Calgary told AFP.

The fossils were first dug up in southeastern Mongolia in the early 1970s, but at the time were identified as belonging to a different tyrannosaur, Alectrosaurus.

For half a century, the fossils sat in the drawers at the Institute of Paleontology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in the capital Ulaanbaatar.

Then PhD student Jared Voris, who was on a trip to Mongolia, started looking through the drawers and noticed something was wrong, Zelenitsky said.

It turned out the fossils were well-preserved, partial skeletons of two different individuals of a completely new species.

"It is quite possible that discoveries like this are sitting in other museums that just have not been recognized," Zelenitsky added.

They named the new species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which roughly means the dragon prince of Mongolia because it is smaller than the "king" T-Rex.

Zelenitsky said the discovery "helped us clarify a lot about the family history of the tyrannosaur group because it was really messy previously".

The T-Rex represented the end of the family line.

It was the apex predator in North America until 66 million years ago, when an asteroid bigger than Mount Everest slammed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Three quarters of life on Earth was wiped out, including all the dinosaurs that did not evolve into birds.

Around 20 million years earlier, Khankhuuluu -- or another closely related family member -- is now believed to have migrated from Asia to North America using the land bridge that once connected Siberia and Alaska.

This led to tyrannosaurs evolving across North America.

Then one of these species is thought to have crossed back over to Asia, where two tyrannosaur subgroups emerged.

One was much smaller, weighing under a ton, and was nicknamed Pinocchio rex for its long snout.

The other subgroup was huge and included behemoths like the Tarbosaurus, which was only a little smaller than the T-rex.

One of the gigantic dinosaurs then left Asia again for North America, eventually giving rise to the T-Rex, which dominated for just two million years until the asteroid struck.