Part 1: Proof of the Existence of the Chesapeake Bay Crater
How much evidence did it take to convince geologists to believe that the Chesapeake crater is there? It started when David Powars and Scott Bruce dug up a core sample. In 1986, Powars and Bruce joined forces because Bruce’s team needed a hole to test water quality, and Powar’s team needed the core from the hole. The deepest hole they dug was in Exmore on the Eastern Shore. This core was like none other they had ever seen before.
The geological order within the core was no longer youngest to oldest. Some of the pieces looked smooshed and twisted together. Powars though he had heard of something like this happening before. He went to the library and read records from Samuel Sanford and John Cederstorm.
In 1913, Sanford published the first groundwater report in Virginia’s coastal plain. He noticed that the wells contained equal concentrations of salt. The result of this is an inland bulge around the lower Chesapeake Bay.
In the 1940s, Cederstorm went hunting for fresh drinking water, but all he found was salt where everyone thought there would be freshwater aquifers. He noted how much salt and mineral content was in all 52 wells. He called the resulting contour an “inland saltwater wedge.”
The rivers were not acting right either. The James, York, and Rappahannock rivers all flow gently southeast until they near the crater. The sinking fill of the crater became the lowest ground which explains the odd behavior of the rivers.
Another piece of evidence was rocks falling to Earth. In 1794, Ernst Chladni, a German physicist, proposed that the rocks fell from outer space. A great debate lasted until 1807 when two geologists from Yale identified them as coming from outer space.
Powars kept insisting that the core “wasn’t wrong,” so he sent an Exmore sample to C. Wylie Poag for fossil dating. Poag analyzed that fossils were for sure mixed together from different geologic ages. The older fossils were above the younger, or they were side by side. The cores from Exmore, Newport News, and from Kiptopeke were also showing a widespread layer of boulders and debris. Powars plotted maps, and they began to show a sudden drop-off in rocky layers.
While Powars was analyzing his rock core, Bruce got his water sample. The water turned out, though, to be 1.5 times saltier than the sea. He also went back to Newport News Park and drilled out another core. The core there, too, had older fossils lying above and next to younger ones. In 1992, Powars and Bruce also dug at Windmill Point on the tip of the Northern Neck which ended up having the same puzzling layer.
Powars wanted a seismic outline of the Earth to see if he could identify the edge of each crater. He called for four years trying to get an oil company to help him. He finally got them to agree in 1993.
The oil company sent out a seismic wave, and the objects that reflected off were just waste material. It was enough to show Powars an outline of the crater. He stated that the land was rolling smoothly and then just breaks out. Even though he had proof of rubble over thousands of square miles, briny water in freshwater aquifers, and a seismic outline, it was still not enough to convince the science critics.
The ultimate proof was the tektites. Poag had retrieved core samples containing tektites and shocked quartz beneath 4,500 feet of ocean water off of New Jersey. Shocked quart has cracks in dark lines along crystal planes when subjected to the astronomical shock of a meteorite impact. Tektites form when melted sand splatters into the air and cools into tears, spheres, and dumbbells of glass as it rides atmospheric winds around the globe.
Tektites had been found 3.6 million square miles off the East Coast. They all looked similar. Poag estimated that the tektites had come from a crater within a few hundred miles of their core hole. Poag sent the Exmore samples off to experts in Austria and South Africa in 1996. They found abundant shocked quartz in jumbled layers. This gave the final convincing proof that the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding land lay over and impact crater which was formed by and enormous explosion about 35 million years ago. Poag, Powars, and Bruce all received the Thomas Jefferson Award in 2000 for their discoveries.
Part Two: Effects of the Chesapeake Bay Crater on Earth
What effects does the Chesapeake Bay meteorite impact have on us today, and how does it influence our lives? In Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore, there is no visible crater there, but it is there. It looks like an upside-down sombrero. It has an upturned outer rim, a trough, and then a high peak in the center. It is all covered in a loose rocky clutter (especially in the middle) called breccias. The breccias in the Chesapeake Bay is different because it has smooth, round rocks.
There are many wells in the breccias that produce undrinkable water. The groundwater is 1.3 times saltier at depths of only 1,330 feet in some areas. Some cities on the rim of the crater, like Norfolk and Virginia Beach, produce very salty water. Moores Bridges, Norfolk produces water 1.4 times saltier than the sea.
The seismic profiles that Powars had proved that the crater impact had possible fractured bedrock seven miles deep into the Earth and as far as 84 miles in diameter. The crater affects the land from the shoreline to West point. It also affects the ocean floor all the way to the continental shelf.
Tektites are a major impact of the crater. They are found 3.6 million square miles around the crater. This area is called the North America Tektite Strewn Field. Mostly all of it came from the Chesapeake Bay crater.
The water we drink and use on an everyday basis comes from groundwater. Groundwater slips through layers of rock, sand, and clay. The clay pores are very tiny, and some carry a static charge that repels water molecules. So, as a result, water moves through the sand.
There were nine different sandy layers where water could fill into aquifers, and there were nine different clay layers that separated the sandy layers. The clay layers restricted water from moving up or down through aquifers.
The impact wrecked all of those layers. The aquifers are now broken where they cross the outer rim of the crater. They are called truncated which means that they are gone. The sandy aquifer beds were shot out into the atmosphere.
David Powars noticed that in southeastern Virginia, in the middle of the crater, the salinity is its highest. You cannot get much water that has sunken in a crater. All you will get is brine. You only have to dig 1,000 feet in the middle of the crater to find saltwater, and the saltwater keeps rising.
Right now there are four aquifers on top of the crater and laid out on the breccias. Before the meteorite impact, there used to be five aquifers. When it hit Earth, the aquifers shattered. Two of those shattered aquifers are being used today by Hampton Roads residents.
More than 1.5 million citizens rely on either groundwater itself or groundwater mixed with freshwater. Everything within the crater is believed to be salty.
The crater also affects local rivers. The impact made the Earth sink. The Chesapeake Bay area became the lowest ground, and the rivers made sharp turns toward there and filled up the crater.
Earthquakes are an effect, too. Earth is always moving. Where the Earth’s plates rub against each other, the planet shivers. Smaller earthquakes have been recorded around Hampton Roads since 1775. They have also occurred earlier, but they were never measured to tell where they originated.
The meteorite hit with a large amount of energy, and that energy went into heat and light which melted the rocks and blasted a hole in the Earth. What was left of the Earth rippled through the Earth’s surface creating swells, waves, and cracks. Cracks or faults broke into concentric circles around the crater. They were intersected by other faults that began at the center of the crater and radiated outward until they looked like the symmetry of a spider web.
The cracks and fractures cause small movements throughout Earth. Earthquakes have been recorded in Painter on the Eastern Shore (1884), Norfolk (1899), Chesapeake (1918), and in York River State Park (1995). These earthquakes plot a large circle that overlies the rim of the crater.
Powars observed a scarp near Mathews County that was about 85 feet above sea level. It juts abruptly from flat fields only twelve feet in elevation and then extends a short distance before sinking down. He noticed that the layers of dirt tilt toward the land instead of sloping seaward, this is because the area is not very stable, and it is always moving with things changing all because of the impact that happened 35 million years ago.
Powars noticed from the seismic data that outside of the crater all over the James River, the basement was higher, and the south side of the crater has a high salinity. The saltwater has never been flushed because the basement is so high up.
In the lower parts of the James River, near the 90 degree turn, the sea level rises the highest. The melting ice from global warming is not the sole cause of rising sea level. It is more likely that the land itself is sinking thanks to the meteorite impact in the Chesapeake Bay area.
Part Three: The Nemesis Theory
The Chesapeake Bay crater was probably formed by a broken apart object from outer space. The Nemesis Theory states that a large impact should cause a global extinction. It is a small red or brown dwarf star that travels on an elongated path that brings it around our sun every 28 million years. The orbit goes through the Oort cloud which is a region of large rocks outside our solar system. As it passes through, the star’s gravitational pull might bump comets loose setting them in the direction of Earth. Many comet or meteorite impacts over millions of years have coincided with Nemesis’ closest approach.
One of the famous 20 ways that the Earth is believed to end is thought to be a collision by a giant comet, asteroid, or meteor. Poag estimates that one house-sized object per month disintegrates in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Also, between one and a dozen marble-sized or smaller sized meteorite land in Virginia each year. The large craters are proof that impacts do occur.
If anything that big were to come our way, we would be able to see it under the right conditions. We would be able to spot it several days in advance. A few days are enough for us to send out a nuclear warhead close enough to the object to nudge it away from Earth without shattering it. If we do not see it, though, and it does hit Earth, then millions of people who live near the impact would be dead in a matter of minutes. It's all a matter of chance.
How much evidence did it take to convince geologists to believe that the Chesapeake crater is there? It started when David Powars and Scott Bruce dug up a core sample. In 1986, Powars and Bruce joined forces because Bruce’s team needed a hole to test water quality, and Powar’s team needed the core from the hole. The deepest hole they dug was in Exmore on the Eastern Shore. This core was like none other they had ever seen before.
The geological order within the core was no longer youngest to oldest. Some of the pieces looked smooshed and twisted together. Powars though he had heard of something like this happening before. He went to the library and read records from Samuel Sanford and John Cederstorm.
In 1913, Sanford published the first groundwater report in Virginia’s coastal plain. He noticed that the wells contained equal concentrations of salt. The result of this is an inland bulge around the lower Chesapeake Bay.
In the 1940s, Cederstorm went hunting for fresh drinking water, but all he found was salt where everyone thought there would be freshwater aquifers. He noted how much salt and mineral content was in all 52 wells. He called the resulting contour an “inland saltwater wedge.”
The rivers were not acting right either. The James, York, and Rappahannock rivers all flow gently southeast until they near the crater. The sinking fill of the crater became the lowest ground which explains the odd behavior of the rivers.
Another piece of evidence was rocks falling to Earth. In 1794, Ernst Chladni, a German physicist, proposed that the rocks fell from outer space. A great debate lasted until 1807 when two geologists from Yale identified them as coming from outer space.
Powars kept insisting that the core “wasn’t wrong,” so he sent an Exmore sample to C. Wylie Poag for fossil dating. Poag analyzed that fossils were for sure mixed together from different geologic ages. The older fossils were above the younger, or they were side by side. The cores from Exmore, Newport News, and from Kiptopeke were also showing a widespread layer of boulders and debris. Powars plotted maps, and they began to show a sudden drop-off in rocky layers.
While Powars was analyzing his rock core, Bruce got his water sample. The water turned out, though, to be 1.5 times saltier than the sea. He also went back to Newport News Park and drilled out another core. The core there, too, had older fossils lying above and next to younger ones. In 1992, Powars and Bruce also dug at Windmill Point on the tip of the Northern Neck which ended up having the same puzzling layer.
Powars wanted a seismic outline of the Earth to see if he could identify the edge of each crater. He called for four years trying to get an oil company to help him. He finally got them to agree in 1993.
The oil company sent out a seismic wave, and the objects that reflected off were just waste material. It was enough to show Powars an outline of the crater. He stated that the land was rolling smoothly and then just breaks out. Even though he had proof of rubble over thousands of square miles, briny water in freshwater aquifers, and a seismic outline, it was still not enough to convince the science critics.
The ultimate proof was the tektites. Poag had retrieved core samples containing tektites and shocked quartz beneath 4,500 feet of ocean water off of New Jersey. Shocked quart has cracks in dark lines along crystal planes when subjected to the astronomical shock of a meteorite impact. Tektites form when melted sand splatters into the air and cools into tears, spheres, and dumbbells of glass as it rides atmospheric winds around the globe.
Tektites had been found 3.6 million square miles off the East Coast. They all looked similar. Poag estimated that the tektites had come from a crater within a few hundred miles of their core hole. Poag sent the Exmore samples off to experts in Austria and South Africa in 1996. They found abundant shocked quartz in jumbled layers. This gave the final convincing proof that the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding land lay over and impact crater which was formed by and enormous explosion about 35 million years ago. Poag, Powars, and Bruce all received the Thomas Jefferson Award in 2000 for their discoveries.
Part Two: Effects of the Chesapeake Bay Crater on Earth
What effects does the Chesapeake Bay meteorite impact have on us today, and how does it influence our lives? In Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore, there is no visible crater there, but it is there. It looks like an upside-down sombrero. It has an upturned outer rim, a trough, and then a high peak in the center. It is all covered in a loose rocky clutter (especially in the middle) called breccias. The breccias in the Chesapeake Bay is different because it has smooth, round rocks.
There are many wells in the breccias that produce undrinkable water. The groundwater is 1.3 times saltier at depths of only 1,330 feet in some areas. Some cities on the rim of the crater, like Norfolk and Virginia Beach, produce very salty water. Moores Bridges, Norfolk produces water 1.4 times saltier than the sea.
The seismic profiles that Powars had proved that the crater impact had possible fractured bedrock seven miles deep into the Earth and as far as 84 miles in diameter. The crater affects the land from the shoreline to West point. It also affects the ocean floor all the way to the continental shelf.
Tektites are a major impact of the crater. They are found 3.6 million square miles around the crater. This area is called the North America Tektite Strewn Field. Mostly all of it came from the Chesapeake Bay crater.
The water we drink and use on an everyday basis comes from groundwater. Groundwater slips through layers of rock, sand, and clay. The clay pores are very tiny, and some carry a static charge that repels water molecules. So, as a result, water moves through the sand.
There were nine different sandy layers where water could fill into aquifers, and there were nine different clay layers that separated the sandy layers. The clay layers restricted water from moving up or down through aquifers.
The impact wrecked all of those layers. The aquifers are now broken where they cross the outer rim of the crater. They are called truncated which means that they are gone. The sandy aquifer beds were shot out into the atmosphere.
David Powars noticed that in southeastern Virginia, in the middle of the crater, the salinity is its highest. You cannot get much water that has sunken in a crater. All you will get is brine. You only have to dig 1,000 feet in the middle of the crater to find saltwater, and the saltwater keeps rising.
Right now there are four aquifers on top of the crater and laid out on the breccias. Before the meteorite impact, there used to be five aquifers. When it hit Earth, the aquifers shattered. Two of those shattered aquifers are being used today by Hampton Roads residents.
More than 1.5 million citizens rely on either groundwater itself or groundwater mixed with freshwater. Everything within the crater is believed to be salty.
The crater also affects local rivers. The impact made the Earth sink. The Chesapeake Bay area became the lowest ground, and the rivers made sharp turns toward there and filled up the crater.
Earthquakes are an effect, too. Earth is always moving. Where the Earth’s plates rub against each other, the planet shivers. Smaller earthquakes have been recorded around Hampton Roads since 1775. They have also occurred earlier, but they were never measured to tell where they originated.
The meteorite hit with a large amount of energy, and that energy went into heat and light which melted the rocks and blasted a hole in the Earth. What was left of the Earth rippled through the Earth’s surface creating swells, waves, and cracks. Cracks or faults broke into concentric circles around the crater. They were intersected by other faults that began at the center of the crater and radiated outward until they looked like the symmetry of a spider web.
The cracks and fractures cause small movements throughout Earth. Earthquakes have been recorded in Painter on the Eastern Shore (1884), Norfolk (1899), Chesapeake (1918), and in York River State Park (1995). These earthquakes plot a large circle that overlies the rim of the crater.
Powars observed a scarp near Mathews County that was about 85 feet above sea level. It juts abruptly from flat fields only twelve feet in elevation and then extends a short distance before sinking down. He noticed that the layers of dirt tilt toward the land instead of sloping seaward, this is because the area is not very stable, and it is always moving with things changing all because of the impact that happened 35 million years ago.
Powars noticed from the seismic data that outside of the crater all over the James River, the basement was higher, and the south side of the crater has a high salinity. The saltwater has never been flushed because the basement is so high up.
In the lower parts of the James River, near the 90 degree turn, the sea level rises the highest. The melting ice from global warming is not the sole cause of rising sea level. It is more likely that the land itself is sinking thanks to the meteorite impact in the Chesapeake Bay area.
Part Three: The Nemesis Theory
The Chesapeake Bay crater was probably formed by a broken apart object from outer space. The Nemesis Theory states that a large impact should cause a global extinction. It is a small red or brown dwarf star that travels on an elongated path that brings it around our sun every 28 million years. The orbit goes through the Oort cloud which is a region of large rocks outside our solar system. As it passes through, the star’s gravitational pull might bump comets loose setting them in the direction of Earth. Many comet or meteorite impacts over millions of years have coincided with Nemesis’ closest approach.
One of the famous 20 ways that the Earth is believed to end is thought to be a collision by a giant comet, asteroid, or meteor. Poag estimates that one house-sized object per month disintegrates in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Also, between one and a dozen marble-sized or smaller sized meteorite land in Virginia each year. The large craters are proof that impacts do occur.
If anything that big were to come our way, we would be able to see it under the right conditions. We would be able to spot it several days in advance. A few days are enough for us to send out a nuclear warhead close enough to the object to nudge it away from Earth without shattering it. If we do not see it, though, and it does hit Earth, then millions of people who live near the impact would be dead in a matter of minutes. It's all a matter of chance.
Post a Comment
Be the first to comment on this article!