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Chesapeake Invader - Discovering America's Giant Meteorite Crater (Hardcover)
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Chesapeake Invader - Discovering America's Giant Meteorite Crater (Hardcover)
Series: Princeton Legacy Library
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Thirty-five million years ago, a meteorite three miles wide and
moving sixty times faster than a bullet slammed into the sea bed
near what is now Chesapeake Bay. The impact, more powerful than the
combined explosion of every nuclear bomb on Earth, blasted out a
crater fifty miles wide and one mile deep. Shock waves radiated
through the Earth for thousands of miles, shaking the foundations
of the Appalachians, as gigantic waves and winds of white-hot
debris transformed the eastern seaboard into a lifeless wasteland.
Chesapeake Invader is the story of this cataclysm, told by the man
who discovered it happened. Wylie Poag, a senior scientist with the
U.S. Geological Survey, explains when and why the catastrophe
occurred, what destruction it caused, how scientists unearthed
evidence of the impact, and how the meteorite's effects are felt
even today. Poag begins by reviewing how scientists in the decades
after World War II uncovered a series of seemingly inexplicable
geological features along the Virginia coast. As he worked to
interpret one of these puzzling findings in the 1980s in his own
field of paleontology, Poag began to suspect that the underlying
explanation was the impact of a giant meteorite. He guides us along
the path that he and dozens of colleagues subsequently followed
as--in true scientific tradition--they combined seemingly
outrageous hypotheses, painstaking research, and equal parts good
and bad luck as they worked toward the discovery of what turned out
to be the largest impact crater in the U.S. We join Poag in the
lab, on deep-sea drilling ships, on the road for clues in Virginia,
and in heated debates about his findings. He introduces us in
clear, accessible language to the science behind meteorite impacts,
to life and death on Earth thirty-five million years ago, and to
the ways in which the meteorite shaped the Chesapeake Bay area by,
for example, determining the Bay's very location and creating the
notoriously briny groundwater underneath Virginia. This is a
compelling work of geological detective work and a paean to the
joys and satisfactions of a life in science. Originally published
in 1999. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest
print-on-demand technology to again make available previously
out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton
University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of
these important books while presenting them in durable paperback
and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is
to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in
the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press
since its founding in 1905.
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