Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans: UK Election campaigning hits "silly season" with #Labour stating "the roads have more potholes than the moon has craters" 🧐 I set the record straight on BBC 'More or Less': way, way more craters than potholes. Still great if Labour is going to fix them tho! 🧪🔭 📻 www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

UK Election campaigning hits "silly season" with #Labour stating "the roads have more potholes than the moon has craters" 🧐 I set the record straight on BBC 'More or Less': way, way more craters than potholes. Still great if Labour is going to fix them tho! 🧪🔭 📻 www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

In fairness to the Labour Party, there are more potholes in the UK than *named* craters on the moon. The IAU @astro4edu.bsky.social has official names for 9176 lunar features, many of which date back to👩‍🔬Mary Blagg's catalogue from 1913. 🔭 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ad...

Mary Adela Blagg - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

One monumental paper (Robbins 2019) manually counts craters in high-res imaging, finding 1.3 million craters with diameters > 1km, already more than the ~1 million potholes in the UK with diameters less <1m. ℹ️: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

A New Global Database of Lunar Impact Craters >1–2 km: 1. Crater Locations and Sizes, Comparisons With Published Databases, and Global Analysisagupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com You have to enable JavaScript in your browser's settings in order to use the eReader.

A reckless extrapolation of the count down to ~1m lunar craters and you're in the region of 10's of billions to 10's of trillions of potholes on moon. Hoping this ends all election potholes > craters statements to bed! 🧪🔭 Huge 🙏 to @planet4589.bsky.social for e-help and advice on this Q.

Well.... I'm pretty confident that the damage caused by potholes to vehicles in Scotland is greater than the damage caused by craters to vehicles on the Moon 😀 Even if you calculate per mile driven per vehicle!

I loved your contribution this morning, thank you for this extra information🌕

Cool, and here I've been thinking of writing a crater counting program from DEMs. Given your count, I think the program would probably run for days depending on the algorithm I devise:)

Ah, but what is the minimum size of a lunar crater and of a British pothole? Choose your data carefully and you can make the statistics tell you most anything you want. (That's the serious point of this otherwise silly skeet.) Otherwise, you may wish to go to Hell! Norway or Moon - your choice.

"1 million potholes in the UK with diameters less <1m." Extrapolated from the number in Blackburn, Lancashire there were 2M potholes in 1967. Ref: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_i... Based on my observations, there must be many more than that now.

A Day in the Life - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Ah, that statistic comes from the RAC: 6 potholes per mile of road.... www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice....

RAC Pothole Index – statistics and data for UK roads | RAC Drivewww.rac.co.uk July 2023, the latest pothole data, statistics and growth projections. Find everything you need to know about potholes here.

Thanks. I wasn't entirely serious of course. Using a 50-odd year old reference was a bit of a giveaway.

Why not name the potholes and make them into tourist attractions

But how many of the potholes have been given names? In an 🍎 -to- 🍎 comparison, it may well be that “Named Lunar Craters” do outnumber “Named British Potholes.”

But do they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall?

Ha! I had never heard of this Beatles reference before recording the show. The presenter Tim Harford is a fan though so ended the show by estimating 10 million potholes, would fill the Albert Hall, by volume.

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