The team suggest that a stream of impacting rocks, hitting the area over ten minutes, carved out the 270 kilometre long and two point seven kilometre deep, and 280 kilometre long and three point five kilometre deep canyons. The team worked this out by looking at photos of the Moon’s surface to generate maps, which were used to calculate the flow directions and speed of the debris ejected during the canyon-forming impact event.

They add that the energy required to carve out these cuts would have been over 130 times the energy that would be released from the current global stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Rather than flying out symmetrically, this work suggests that the majority of the excavated debris was asymmetrically distributed away from the pole. The Schrödinger impact basin is near the exploration zone for the upcoming Artemis mission; thus, these findings could have implications for future lunar missions, offering insights into the composition of potential landing sites.