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Moonquakes: Seismic Ringing of a Dry, Fractured Moon

Interactive 3D simulator of moonquakes: trigger a shallow moonquake, deep moonquake or meteorite impact and watch seismic energy scatter through the Moon's dry, fractured megaregolith, producing the hours-long 'bell-like' reverberation Apollo seismometers recorded — versus Earth's fast quake decay.

Space & Astronomy3DModerate60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 2D version

Apollo's seismometer network discovered something Earth seismology never sees: moonquakes and meteorite impacts that keep "ringing" for hours instead of dying out in minutes. This simulator renders the Moon as a field of seismic scatter points and lets you trigger a shallow moonquake, a deep moonquake or a meteorite impact, watching the wavefront spread from the source at real seismic wave speed and then decay according to the same exponential-envelope physics (governed by the seismic quality factor Q) that made the real Apollo records so strange. A live strip chart tracks the trace at a fixed "Apollo site" marker, with readouts for elapsed time, current amplitude and the predicted coda duration — and a Q slider that lets you compare the Moon's dry, fractured megaregolith directly against Earth-like rock.

⚙ Under the hood

Trigger a shallow moonquake, deep moonquake or meteorite impact and watch seismic energy scatter through the Moon's dry, fractured megaregolith, reproducing the hours-long 'bell-like' reverberation Apollo seismometers recorded.

moonquakeseismologylunarApollowave propagationregolith

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install