The caverns of the Moon.

Lanzarote is one of the Canary Islands, which is featured on the cover of the August 2025 issue of Science Robotics magazine, because the main theme of the magazine is robotic and cooperative exploration between different robots in lunar caves. The reason for this is that an experiment with real robots has been carried out on Lanzarote, because this island has numerous lava tubes similar to those found on the Moon.

It is known that there are numerous lava tubes on the moon as a result of intense volcanic activity in the past. Furthermore, due to the special conditions on the moon, where there is no movement of tectonic plates and the crust is much thicker than that of Earth and has lower gravity, these caverns have been frozen in time and can also reach enormous sizes due to the special conditions of the moon, in the crust, the lack of tectonic plate movement, these caves reach gigantic sizes.

In 2017, JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, announced that it had found a tunnel up to 50 km long and about 100 m wide located in the Marius Hills. With those dimensions, you could fit an entire city inside. The Japanese managed to locate this tunnel thanks to a probe called Selena Cayuga, which means “bright light” in Japanese, which orbited the moon for a year and eight months. And they are not the only ones who have discovered caves.

The Chandrayan 1 orbital probe from XRO, India's space agency, photographed a collapsed lunar tunnel that was about 2 km long and 360 meters wide. With 360 meters of width, a lot can be done. So far, more than 200 pits or holes have been located on the Moon, some of which may be simple pits, but many are believed to be openings to underground tunnel networks.

Where did all these tunnels come from? Well, from the volcanic activity that the Moon had in the past. The Moon had brutal volcanic activity, with real seas of liquid lava. Lava can flow, forming underground rivers, and as the flow of that river decreases, a void is created, which is ultimately what creates the lava tunnel. This also happens on Earth and can be gigantic in size.

In 2016, a study was published as a result of the surface gravity analyzes carried out by the two probes of NASA's GRAIL mission. By analyzing the surface gravity, you can more or less intuit what is underneath and the density of what is underneath. Obviously, if there is a cavern, the density of that area, the gravity of that area will be lower because its density is lower. According to the data collected by these two probes, this mission, it is possible that there are tunnels that are not only long, but that they could be up to 1 km wide and the researchers also calculated that they could become stable with only having a 2 meter thick roof, something incredible.

At a deeper depth, at more than 500 meters deep, researchers believe that due to the characteristics of the Moon there may be gigantic lava tubes up to 5 km wide, perfectly stable, a cavern 5 km wide, the graph above is from the study published by those researchers and compares that cavern with the city of Philadelphia, one could say that it is colossal, with that volume entire ecosystems can be created in those caves.

A cave that is 500 meters deep or 1 km deep would also be immune to the impact of normal meteorites, if a large asteroid hits, no, but from normal meteorites it would be immune and could withstand the pressure you put in there, because you could also get entire ecosystems inside the caves, but you have to create an atmospheric pressure equal to or similar to that on Earth, the question you may be able to ask yourself is, what happens with earthquakes? moles?

Lunamotos, or rather, the earthquakes on the moon that from time to time say that they can be dangerous for the lunar bases that are installed on the Moon, the earthquakes on the Moon are much less than those on Earth and are also less intense than those we have on Earth, although yes, they are a little rare, their duration is much longer and most are caused by the impact of asteroids.

If they affect the caves, it will surely be on a very small scale, because most of them are more than 2,000 million years old and this indicates that they have to be very stable and that they will surely last at least a few million more years without giving problems to the humans who occupy them, because that is the key to the issue.

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