Moon fountains

Moon dust is a strange substance : we reported previously about the abrasive capabilities of the dust, but there are more strange things about moon dust. The moon's surface material is one of the lousiest imaginable electrical conductors, so the dust normally on the surface picks up and keeps a charge. And what happens to particles carrying like electrical charges? Right : they are repelled from each other. And if a hundred-kilometer circle with a rim a couple of kilometers high is charged all over, what happens to the dust lying on it? The answer, given only by narrative description, is that electrostatic charging caused the dust to levitate, causing fountains of moon dust.

But there's more : the dayside of the moon is mainly positively charged; the nightside is negatively charged. At the interface between night and day electrostatically charged dust would be pushed across the terminator sideways. So, what do you get when miles of electrostatic dust gets attracted ? A long and skinny dust storm, stretching all the way from the north pole to the south pole, swirling across the surface, following the terminator as sunrise ceaselessly sweeps around the moon.
Scientists are increasingly confident that this kind of electrostatic storms are real.