最新研究表明，月球上的冰可能有几十亿年的历史了

It has long been established that the moon contains significant amounts of ice and water, including frozen water found on the lunar surface last year. Now, a new study suggests that the ice could be billions of years old and come from different sources.

长期以来，人们一直认为月球上含有大量的冰和水，包括去年在月球表面发现的冷冻水。现在，一项新的研究表明，这些冰可能有数十亿年的历史，来自不同的来源。

The study, published in the scientific journal Icarus, suggests that some ice could be almost as old as the moon itself. Other ice deposits could be much younger, perhaps put there by comets and asteroids, or even underground volcanic activity.

这项发表在科学杂志《伊卡洛斯》(Icarus)上的研究表明，一些冰的年龄可能与月球本身的年龄差不多。其他的冰层可能要年轻得多，可能是彗星和小行星，甚至是地下火山活动造成的。

“We quantify the amount of available cold-trapping surface area that is occupied by water ice in order to examine the relationship between the patchiness of ice within each crater and the age of each host crater,” the study’s abstract states.

该研究的摘要称:“我们量化了水冰所占的可用冷阱表面积，以研究每个陨石坑内冰的碎片和每个主陨石坑的年龄之间的关系。”

“The majority of surface ice is contained in old craters [greater than 3.1 billion years], where the majority of cold-trapping area on the pole exists.”

“绝大多数地表冰都包含在旧陨石坑中(大于31亿年)，而南极的大部分冷捕捉区都存在于这些陨石坑中。”

“Just because the crater is old doesn’t mean that the ice within it is also that old too, but in this case, there’s reason to believe the ice is indeed old,” the researchers said in a statement.

研究人员在一份声明中说:“仅仅因为陨石坑很老并不意味着里面的冰也很老，但在这种情况下，我们有理由相信这些冰确实很老。”