Deep Impact
By Callimachus | Related entries in In The News, Kitchen Sink, Science
How many of the thousands of people who cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel realize they’re crossing the crater of one of the largest identified meteor strikes in North America? When you look out over the sheet of the bay, or drive through the placid tidewater towns, that kind of Old Testament catastrophe isn’t easy to imagine.
Geologists know its down there, however. And they’ve recently begun a quest to expand their knowledge.
CHERITON – About a mile off U.S. 13, amid fields of green-and-yellow soybeans, geologists are closing in on an ancient cataclysm.
Yesterday afternoon, an international team of scientists used an 80-foot-tall drill rig to pull out yet another 10-foot core of clay and silt that sits atop a 53-mile-wide crater buried below the Chesapeake Bay.
… The Chesapeake Bay impact crater is the largest in the United States and the sixth-largest in the world. As deep as the Grand Canyon, it sits below about 1,000 feet of rubble and sediment beneath the lower part of the Chesapeake Bay, its surrounding peninsulas and the inner continental shelf of the Atlantic Ocean.
[I blogged about this in some detail before, here.]
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