Exploring the marvel that are mountains on the Moon

Unlike the millions of years it takes for most mountains on Earth to form, lunar mountains crop out near-instantly, geologically speaking.

Mountains on our dear Earth primarily form when two colliding plates of Terra’s crust lift up volumes of rock, slowly creating an elevated landform. Over millions of years, wind, water, and gravity erode these uplifted sections, shaping their surface as the mountains we are familiar with today. But the Moon has no plate tectonics, atmosphere, or running water. How then does it boast mountains several kilometers tall? For instance, Zeeman Mons on the Moon’s farside peaks as high as Mount Everest.

The answer lies in the one of Luna’s most apparent features: craters. Most lunar craters are small and bowl-shaped, formed by asteroids and comets impacted the lunar surface. This shape persists for crater sizes up to about 20 kilometers but craters larger than that display variety due to more complex physics. When giant asteroids or comets strike the Moon, their high velocities impart tremendous forces onto the surface. This process doesn’t just create a crater by punching the crust but compresses the surface in and around the impact point with enough intensity that it melts the crust. When the melted crust can’t be compressed any further, it bounces back and forms a central mountain upon cooling. This process is visualized in the GIF below.

Most lunar mountains formed by this highly energetic process emerged in geologically negligible passages of time. Two such fine peaks mark the centers of the city-sized Aristarchus crater and 86-kilometer-wide Tycho crater. Each peak stands over a kilometer tall.

Two fun facts about the Tycho crater are that you can spot it easily as a bright feature in the southern hemisphere of the Moon, and that it was formed about 108 million years ago, a time when dinosaurs thrived on Earth. For all we know, tall and curious Sauropods witnessed the formation of this massive crater. That would’ve been their clue to start a space program and avoid their extinction caused by the Earth-impacting asteroid 42 million years later.

The Aristarchus crater was one of the candidate landing sites for the eventually cancelled Apollo 17+ missions. Visiting Aristarchus or Tycho in a future mission will allow us to study exposed lunar interiors by the virtue of their central mountains. Unlike Earth and Venus, the Moon lacking any significant tectonic activity means the structure of its interior is largely well preserved since its formation about 4.4 billion years ago. Luna is a natural archive in the sky for scientists to understand how insides of planets form across the Solar System and even those beyond. The central mountain of Tycho offer an easier glimpse into the Moon’s interior.

Some large craters host not one but two mountains. If the impactor that created them is a more massive body, or slams with a higher velocity, the mechanics work such that the newly formed crater’s central peak splits into two before solidifying. The 93-kilometer-wide Copernicus and 77-kilometer-wide King craters host two such distinct peaks respectively, each towering for more than six kilometers.

Apart from these places being lucrative for scientists to study the Moon’s interior, they also help researchers understand exactly how impact cratering takes place, not just on the Moon but across the Solar System and worlds beyond. The airless Moon is the calibration ground to understand the fundamentals of impact physics.

Put a ring on it

During the formation of even larger craters, the central peak splits and spreads to form a mountain ring, just like a liquid drop causes a ripple in still water. The intensity of the asteroid strike is so massive in such cases that ripples in water is essentially the same physics that applies to visualize a ripple in melted crust! The 312-kilometer-wide Schrödinger crater on the Moon’s farside is a well preserved example with a crowned mountain ring, despite being almost four billion years old.

An exploration mission to Schrödinger, such as the one NASA contracted in 2021 but cancelled in 2026, can help advance fundamental mysteries about the Moon’s evolution, adding to the recent rich insights gained about the lunar crust and mantle from China’s Chang’e 6 farside samples. The Chicxulub crater on Earth, linked to the extinction of dinosaurs, is also thought to have formed as a ringed crater but Earth’s active weathering has worn down its impact-created structure. As such, craters like Schrödinger on the Moon offer us a way to better understand Chicxulub as well.

For craters larger than 500 kilometers, you get not one but multiple ripples and thus multiple mountain rings. The 930-kilometer-wide ancient Orientale crater on the Moon’s farside boasts three mountain rings, most of which remain preserved. The Artemis II astronauts, who flew around the Moon in April 2026, observed Orientale from their spacecraft.

Surface missions to and samples from both Schrödinger and Orientale can help scientists understand exactly when and how large asteroids and comets excessively bombarded bodies in the Solar System. This period of blistering impacts is particularly important as Earth is thought to have gotten its water, and possibly life-critical organics, from asteroids and/or comets during this time. In fact, what we learn from such missions can challenge the chain of events we only assume to have happened. For example, a recent Chang’e 6 sample study argues for a more gradual decline in impacts about four billion years ago as opposed to the more popular notion of a sudden spike in impacts around that time.

For some ancient craters like Imbrium on Moon’s nearside, only parts of its outermost mountain ring are visible today. The basin’s interior has been drowned in lava plains, which you see as dark regions on the Moon. The prominent, arc-shaped mountain range of Montes Apenninus on Imbrium’s southeastern border stretches 600 kilometers long.

Multi-ring impact basins exist on many other worlds in the Solar System as well. There’s Caloris on Mercury, an unnamed basin on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, Evander on Saturn’s moon Dione, and several more. Jupiter’s moon Callisto boasts the Solar System’s largest multi-ring basin called Valhalla, which spans 3800 kilometers.

Mountains on the Moon are a marvel, providing us a peak (pun intended) into lunar and planetary interiors while also helping us discern the chain of events in the Solar System’s evolution. The ubiquity of planetary mountains formed by impacts, and their consistent patterns, indicate common physics and geological mechanisms in nature’s play. The Moon being so close to us offers opportunities to study these fundamental processes in planetary physics in great, testable detail. Upcoming lunar rovers as well as sample return missions like India’s Chandrayaan 4 and crewed Chinese & US missions aiming to study the mountainous and hitherto unexplored lunar south pole will lend us new insights into planetary mountains everywhere.

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Article originally published in 2021, edited and updated with more context in 2026. Original piece republished by The Wire Science.