SkyandTelescope.com August 2014 29It seemed that oblique impacts ought to form elongated
craters, whereas almost all the lunar craters are circular
in outline.
As this debate was unfolding in the scientifi c com-
munity, the rattling explosions of World War I artillery
shells showed by direct example how meteorites might
form craters on the Moon. The fi rst scientist to work
out the meteorite-impact theory in mathematical detail
and explain the predominance of circular craters was
Algernon Charles Giff ord of Wellington College in New
Zealand — who did so shortly after the war. Indeed,
many of Giff ord’s students fought for the Empire, serving
with distinction on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915 and in
Flanders and the Somme in 1916. No Man’s Land between
the Somme’s trenches was saturated with gaping cavi-
ties, creating a scene that the British poet Wilfred Owen
described as “like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-
ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.”
Master of the Moon
Charlie Giff ord seemed fated to an adventurous career
from the very moment of his birth in 1861, which
occurred at sea somewhere off Africa’s Cape of Good
Hope. His father, 10 years an Anglican curate in Labra-
dor, was en route to a new parish, Waitaki, on the South
Island of New Zealand. Young Charlie grew up in the
village of Oamaru, receiving his primary education at the
local grammar school.
He was sent to England in 1876 to obtain a solid British
education, and won, by virtue of his outstanding math-CIRCULAR CRATER Like most of its brethren, the lunar crater
Giordano Bruno, pictured here in an image from NASA’s Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter, has a nearly circular shape. For many
decades, scientists thought lunar craters were volcanic in origin
because they imagined that impact structures, formed mostly by
projectiles arriving at an oblique angle, should be oblong.NASA / GSFC / ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY