This passage was excerpted from material published in 1996.

When a large body strikes a planet or moon, material is ejected, thereby creating a hole in the planet and a local deficit of mass. This deficit shows up as a gravity anomaly: the removal of the material that has been ejected to make the hole results in an area of slightly lower gravity than surrounding areas. One would therefore expect that all of the large multi-ring impact basins on the surface of Earth's Moon would show such negative gravity anomalies, since they are, essentially, large holes in the lunar surface. Yet data collected in 1994 by the Clementine spacecraft show that many of these lunar basins have no anomalously low gravity and some even have anomalously high gravity.Scientists speculate that early in lunar history, when large impactors struck the Moon's surface, causing millions of cubic kilometers of crustal debris to be ejected, denser material from the Moon's mantle rose up beneath the impactors almost immediately, compensating for the ejected material and thus leaving no low gravity anomaly in the resulting basin. Later, however, as the Moon grew cooler and less elastic, rebound from large impactors would have been only partial and incomplete. Thus today such gravitational compensation probably would not occur: the outer layer of the Moon is too cold and stiff.


According to the passage, the gravitational compensation referred to in the highlighted text is caused by which of the following?


A deficit of mass resulting from the creation of a hole in the lunar surface

The presence of material from the impactor in the debris created by its impact

The gradual cooling and stiffening of the Moon's outer layer

The ejection of massive amounts of debris from the Moon's crust

The rapid upwelling of material from the lunar mantle

考题讲解

此讲解的内容由AI生成,还未经人工审阅,仅供参考。

正确答案是 E。
因为文章指出,当大型撞击者撞击月球表面时,月球不久就会从其地幔中迅速上涌来密集的物质,从而补偿被抛射出去的物质,从而使得所产生的盆地中没有低重力异常。因此,本题正确答案是 E 选项,即迅速上涌来的月球地幔物质引起的重力补偿。

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