Carved Lake Art Sells Custom Wood Art Ranging From Wall Clocks, and Coffee Tables to Laser Cut Depth Charts of Your Favorite Bodies Of Water From America and around the Globe.
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Chesapeake Bay History & the Meteor That Formed the Groundwater
Close to multiple metropolitan centers and abutting the nation’s capital, Chesapeake Bay operates today as a major tourist attraction, but its past includes a varied and often colorful series of events. As the biggest estuary in the United States, it offers visitors 11,684 miles of winding coastline to explore. Travelers experience everything from boating to catching the famous blue crabs of the bay.
Chesapeake Bay has its origins in the warm environment of the late Eocene epoch. Around 35 million years ago, a bolidea meteor radiating twice the light of a full moonslammed into the ground between what is now Virginia and Delaware. The resulting Chesapeake Bay meteor crater measured 53 miles in diameter and eight-tenths of a mile in depth. With a newly formed basin, surrounding rivers diverted their courses and created a single channel that dug an impressive river valley over the subsequent millennia. The currently recognizable Chesapeake Bay formation has only been around for about 12,000 years, created when sea levels rose from melting glaciers and submerged the river valley. Surprisingly, the meteor’s havoc continues to this day. Bedrock fractured by the impact often allows deeper saltwater to seep into freshwater aquifers. These same fractures also cause surrounding land to slowly slide down into the ancient crater. Additionally, in 2013 while scientists were studying the impact crater, they discovered “the oldest large body of ancient seawater in the world,” early Cretaceous seawater, resting about a half-mile underground near the bay. It is estimated that the water is between 100 million and 150 million years old.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Knowing the kind of understanding we have in it and experiencing the right manner would help us with a lot niagara falls day trip from new york city can always be experienced and that has to be with the most reasonable outcome which is being followed in a helpful way to us..
ReplyDelete