Chesapeake Bay Crater Offers Clues To Ancient Cataclysm

Natinal Geographic ^ | 11-13-2001 | Hillary Mayell

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Don't forget the Leonid shower coming up this weekend. It is being covered on other threads.

[green team 1999]

good posting,thanks.

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Bump.

[cogitator]

Excellent article. Thanks!

When I first moved to Maryland, there was a short series of essentially "unexplained" Richter 2-3 earthquakes in eastern Howard County. The geologists cited a fault system that runs through Howard County and northern Baltimore County. I wonder if the fault could be related to the southern Chesapeake Bay impact site. Probably not, but a possibility, I guess.

[sawsalimb]

Thanks-had never heard of this one. Also,regarding your earlier thread on meteor impacts causing the fall of civilizations,I have no trouble at all finding this plausible. An impact wouldn't even have to be that big(in relative terms) to wipe out a culture that was based on human labor and animal transport. Evacuation would have been undreamed of,and even if you survived the initial impact,if the devastated area was more than a few hundred miles in diameter,scraping together enough food to sustain yourself and finding some way to transport it to another location would be next to impossible for more than a tiny number of people.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

Cable (A&E or TNT) will be showing a program about animal life during the Tertiary Era, the Age of Mammals, which followed the Dinosaurs. It is going to concentrate on the first half of the Era. the up through the Oligocene period referred to in this story.

The animals of this time look stranger than the Dinos, because we have been shown a lot about the great reptiles. The predators at that time were called creodonts, now totally extinct except for their descendants the whales. They looks something like current carnivores, since they filled the same niches, but are not related. The carnivores existed in hiding, looking rather like a cross between foxes and coyotes. All current carnivores descended from them.

The largest land animal that has lived since the Dinosaurs was a really weird animal called the 'Beast of Baluchistan', discovered in that province which neighbors afghanistan. It has no living relatives. All in all a really strange period, much less familiar than the time of the Dinosaurs, despite being closer in time, and including animals much more closely related to our current fauna.

[Aurelius]

BUMP

[sawsalimb]

Wild speculation on my part-I live in South Central Texas,and a few mild earthquakes occur south of San Antonio from time to time. There has also been speculation that the western half of the Gulf of Mexico(the Texas coastline and the Yucatan Peninsula)is actually the remnants of a big meteor strike. Wonder if there's a connection.

[Interesting Times]

Interesting article.

About 35 million years ago—the dinosaurs are dead, but the Appalachian Mountains are still covered in tropical rain forests—a rock from space that was more than a mile wide and moving at supersonic speed crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off North America.

Supersonic? Now there's an understatement. We're almost certainly talking about an impact speed in the tens of miles per second compared to around 1,100 feet per second for the speed of sound.

Presumably what the writer meant by 'supersonic' was "really, really fast..."

[DuncanWaring]

There has also been speculation that the western half of the Gulf of Mexico(the Texas coastline and the Yucatan Peninsula)is actually the remnants of a big meteor strike.

The meteor strike 66 million years ago that kilt off the dinosaurs was in the vicinity of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Supposedly kicked up stuff as far as the Pacific Northwest.

[DuncanWaring]

Supersonic? Now there's an understatement.

The quoted "70,000 miles per hour" works out to roughly Mach 100.

[blam]

There has also been speculation that the western half of the Gulf of Mexico(the Texas coastline and the Yucatan Peninsula)is actually the remnants of a big meteor strike. Wonder if there's a connection."

Don't know about the connection but, the Chixlub (dino killer 65 million years ago) crashed just north of the Yuchatan in the Gulf of Mexico.

[csvset]

Our local paper did a seven part series on this. Here is the link. Enjoy. Click here

[aculeus]

Good post!

[blam]

Good link. Thanks.

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