ArticleNature astronomy2025
Evidence of a 4.33 billion year age for the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin.
Article in Nature astronomy, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- The bombardment history on the lunar farside revealed byScience advances · 2026Article
- Chang'e-6 farside anorthosites indicate hemispherically comparable magma ocean solidification.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A southward differentiated impactor forms the tapered shape of the South Pole-Aitken impact basin on the Moon.Science advances · 2026Article
- Lunar chronology model with the Chang'e-6 farside samples and implications for the early impact history.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- The source and thermal driver of young (<3.0 Ga) lunar volcanism.Science advances · 2025Article
- Article
- Sulfur isotopes from the lunar farside reveal global volatile loss following the giant impact.Nature communications · 2025Article
- South Pole-Aitken massive impact 4.25 billion years ago revealed by Chang'e-6 samples.National science review · 2025Article
- The oldest anchor for lunar crater chronology constrained by the new age of 4.25 Ga of the South Pole-Aitken basin.National science review · 2025Article
- Review
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
The Moon's farside South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin is the largest and oldest visible impact basin in the inner Solar System. Determining the timing of this catastrophic event is key to understanding the onset of the lunar basin-forming epoch, with implications for understanding the impact bombardment history of the inner Solar System. Despite this, the formation age of the SPA basin remains poorly constrained. Here we show that the chemical composition of the lunar meteorite Northwest Africa 2995 is in good agreement with lithologies exposed within the southern region of the SPA basin. Radiometric dating of a range of mineral and rock components in Northwest Africa 2995 yielded consistent dates of ~4.32-4.33 billion years old. We interpret these dates as the age of SPA basin formation, inferring that this event occurred ~120 million years before the formation of the main cluster of lunar impact basins between ~4.2 Ga and 3.8 Ga. This weakens support for a narrow period of lunar late heavy impact bombardment and also implies that the earliest formed impact basins on the Moon (that is, >4.33-4.5 Ga old) were erased either by the SPA impact itself when its formation caused massive resurfacing of the lunar surface or through other geological processes.
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