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The distinctively similar oxygen isotopic compositions of moon rocks and Earth rocks clearly show common ancestry. Relative to Earth, however, the moon is highly depleted in iron and in volatile elements that are needed to form atmospheric gases and water.
5. All moon rocks originated through high-temperature processes with little or no involvement with water. They are roughly divisible into three types: basalts, anorthosites, and breccias.
6. The lunar magma ocean was followed by a series of large asteroid impacts that created basins which were later filled by lava flows.
The large, dark basins such as Mare Imbrium are gigantic impact craters, formed early in lunar history, that were later filled by lava flows about 3.2-3.9 billion years ago. Lunar volcanism occurred mostly as lava floods that spread horizontally; volcanic fire fountains produced deposits of orange and emerald-green glass beads.
7. The lunar highlands were formed 4.4-4.6 billion years ago by flotation of an early, feldspar-rich crust on a magma ocean that covered the moon to a depth of many tens of kilometers. Innumerable meteorite impacts through geologic time reduced much of the ancient crust to mountain ranges between basins.
8. Little has occurred on the moon since about 3 billion years ago; after the volcanic fires died the only activity has been the occasional formation of an impact crater and the constant rain of micrometeorites.
9. Since the Apollo missions there have been two fly-by visits in the early 1990's by the Jupiter-bound Galileo space craft which, using spectral filters to map the moon surface, noted the presence of high iron rocks in the floor of the South Pole-Aitkin basin. Further visits were made in 1994 by the spacecraft Clementine which orbited the moon for 71 days and obtained a complete global map of the lunar surface in 11 wavelengths. Later, the Lunar Prospector in 1998 mapped the moon's surface composition using gamma-ray and neutron spectroscopy. Both found evidence for water ice at the poles.
Numbers 7 and 8 above illustrate the enormous difference between The Urantia Book's account of earth-moon relationships during their construction phase and that formulated from scientific investigations. The Urantia Book has the earth and the moon following a parallel pathway of growth through the 2.5 billion years ago period but diverging at 2.0 billion years ago when the Earth captured "enormous space bodies." In contrast, modern science has utilized advanced techniques to produce a picture in which both the earth and the moon utilized the same pool of building materials in a process (the accumulation of mass) that was virtually complete for each around 4.6 billion years ago.
For the moon, volcanic activity and lava flow continued until 3.2 billion years ago, after which activity ceased other than for occasional collisions with meteorites.
This was a time at which The Urantia Book claims building activity for both earth and moon had hardly commenced. (The Urantia Book says 2.5 billion years ago the earth was 1/10th its present mass.)
The world ocean and the first continent
According to The Urantia Book between 1.5 and 1.0 billion years ago the "whole earth was a veritable fiery inferno" towards the end of which "for thousands of years Urantia was enveloped in a continuous blanket of steam" through which "the sun never shone upon the earth's surface." This, the Book states, was the time of appearance of the first primitive ocean and the formation of sediments on the ocean floor. However because there was no free oxygen in the atmosphere, these early oceanic deposits were devoid of "colored stones or shales." (660) Presumably this comment refers to the absence of iron salts in their ferric (oxidized) form which are from red to reddish-brown.
But according to modern science the reality was entirely different. Colored sedimentary deposits that originated in oceans are dated to be at least 2.5 billion years old and as a result of oxygenation of the ocean waters through photosynthesis.1 Stromatolites that are formed in the shallow oceans may be up to thirty meters thick and ten meters high--and are the product of
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