One possible explanation for transients, he says, is volcanic gas escaping from the moon’s interior to the surface, where it might build up under the fine lunar soil until it erupts, puffing up a visible cloud of dust.
I have to assume the word “soil” was the choice of the article writer and not Crotts’.
Elsewise, it’s fun speculation, but they really need to determine whether there is a phenomenon in need of explanation before worrying much about the explanation. Happily, the last paragraph indicates that that’s just what he is aiming to do:
Crotts’ analysis goes further than prior work in proving that transients are real, but the gas explanation is “mostly ‘correlations equals causation,’” says astrophysicist Paul Spudis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Transients are considered fringe, he adds, because observations are hard to confirm or replicate. Hoping to address that problem, Crotts is currently setting up a robotic imaging system in Chile to begin a systematic search for transients.
I would suspect terrestrial atmospheric turbulence first—especially for the events described as “pinpoint distortions”.
