[meteorite-list] Scientists Blast Into The Earth's Past in Virginia (Chesapeake Bay Crater)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Oct 11 13:22:19 2004
Message-ID: <200410111722.KAA04696_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=76631&ran=167519

Scientists blast into the Earth's past in Virginia

David Powars, the scientist who worked tirelessly to begin the project
to study the impact crater, gives an impromptu history lesson about the
crater to tourists in Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore.
David Powars, the scientist who worked tirelessly to begin the project
to study the impact crater, gives an impromptu history lesson about the
crater to tourists in Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore. PHOTOS BY VICKI
CRONIS/THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT.

By JOANNE KIMBERLIN
The Virginian-Pilot
October 11, 2004

EASTERN SHORE - Crickets thrummed in the dark mist. A harvest moon
glowed orange in the heavens. The Earth moved.

Thirty-five times.

It shuddered repeatedly because scientists detonated a 20-mile-long
string of underground explosives along Virginia's Eastern Shore last
week. The concussions, bouncing back from far below, will help map the
most detailed profile yet of an ancient wound in the planet's crust: the
35-million-year-old Chesapeake Bay impact crater.

Pushing the button was the easy part; reaching countdown required a
diplomatic endeavor worthy of the United Nations .

Scores of locals had to open their gates to dozens of scholarly visitors
- a remarkable consensus in a community that doesn't cotton much to
intrusion .

One by one, residents yielded to the common good , and to the
long-winded, high-wattage, caffeine-powered zeal of a wiry scientist
from the Shenandoah Valley, the man who loves the crater the most .

No one knows whether an asteroid or a comet gouged the one-mile-deep,
56-mile-wide crater beneath the Bay. But judging by the damage it caused
, the meteorite slammed into the planet at about 76,000 mph. The
explosion, equal to 10 trillion tons of TNT, wiped out life for miles
around, creating the largest impact crater in the United States and the
sixth-largest in the world.

Thousand-foot-tall tidal waves likely topped parts of the Blue Ridge
Mountains.

Concealed by the Bay and filled in the passing eons by rock and
sediment, the crater wasn't discovered until the mid-1980s.

David Powars was one of the first scientists convinced of its existence
- a notion many of his colleagues had scoffed at for years. Now
confirmed by a battery of drill samples and other tests, the crater will
be investigated deeper than ever next fall, when a $1.5 million core
hole punches 7,000 feet into its mysteries.

Scientists now suspect the crater is the culprit behind a host of
modern-day concerns, from the region's shortage of fresh ground water to
its slow sink into the sea. Answers could lie inside layers brought up
in the drill tube. A sort of seismic ultrasound, created by last week's
blasts, will determine the bull's-eye for the drill bit.

To get the best picture, an alphabet soup of some two dozen "ologists" -
experts in rocks, fossils, atmosphere, outer space and more - descended
on the Shore a couple of weeks ago.

Since then, the team has laid a line of 70-foot-deep shot holes that
stretches from the center of the crater, located beneath the town of
Cape Charles, to its northeastern rim, near Nassawadox. Some 700
seismographs, tuned to record the results, had to be poked into the soil
every 50 yards along the line. All were on private property - often
co-owned by a web of relatives.

Powars, as the point man of the operation, began knocking on doors in
March, spinning his spiel, trying to win access to the land he needed.

"I'd get one person's OK and then find out I also had to get it from
their cousins or their brothers or their in-laws," Powars said. "I bet I
wound up talking to 150 people. Some of them were scattered across the
country. One was in a mental institution. Let's just say that one was
interesting."

Fortunately for Powars, talking is among the things he does best. When
he's excited, as he is about the crater, his words gush in a non stop
stream that's almost legendary.

"We all love David," said Greg Gohn, Powars' boss at the U.S. Geological
Survey. "But you just have to walk away sometimes."

Powars does not take offense.

"I didn't say a word until I was 10," he said . "But I haven't shut up
since."

His chatter proved effective with landowners.

Many nodded immediately while others required some courting. Powars put
in plenty of hours perched on living room sofas, answering questions.

"You can't blame them," he said. "Here was some kook wanting to blow up
things on their land."

Some refused to open their doors to or answer calls from an outsider. To
breech their stronghold, Powars enlisted the aid of other locals, who
contacted their neighbors on his behalf.

"By the time it was done, I was adopted," Powars said. "People were
feeding me meals. Now, I feel like I know the people better in this
community than I know the ones in my own."

In the end, only one family resisted his enthusiasm, a rejection that
will leave a mile-long gap in the seismic profile.

"I worked on them until the very end," Powars said, "but they were
fighting among themselves and just wouldn't come around. It's a set
back, but we'll have to live with it."

For the most part, meteor mania blossomed as word spread. Almost 100
people attended a meeting Powars held last month in Cape Charles.

Tom Saunders, a project manager at the town's new Bay Creek development,
was impressed.

"You can't get 100 people to come to a meeting in Cape Charles if you're
giving away money," Saunders said.

Saunders helped pave the way for a shot hole on one of Bay Creek's golf
courses.

"Astronomy is my hobby," he said, "so anything having to do with a rock
from space is interesting to me."

Saunders would like to see sleepy Cape Charles benefit from its status
as the crater's ground zero. There has been talk of building an

interpretive center to draw tourists. "Something like this defines the
kind of whack this old ball can take and shrug off," Saunders said. "If
one thing can put Cape Charles on the map of global significance, this
crater is it."

Mayor Frank Lewis isn't convinced an underwater hole is marketable.

"Seems like it'd be hard to start an industry around something no one
can see," he said.

Other locals are more interested in basic concerns. Granville Hogg gave
Powars' crew the go-ahead to store equipment and drill shot holes on his
family's 200-acre property north of Cape Charles. Groundwater is the
payoff for Hogg.

The crater ruptured underwater aquifers, limiting the region's fresh
water supply and leaving farmers, residents and developers accusing each
other of using too much. Studies hope to make some sense of the
fractured layers, information that could contribute to better decisions.

"There's a whole lot of finger pointing," Hogg said, "but nobody has any
scientific data to back up any of it."

As for the scientists themselves, they're delighted to be the first to
explore the anatomy of a crater so well preserved by the blanket of the
Bay. Exhausted by weeks spent tromping through farm fields and
bug-swarmed swamps, scientists were thrilled to finally close in on
detonation last week.

Powars, functioning on too little sleep and too much coffee and candy,
was a verbal shockwave. An unexpected surplus of explosives and
seismographs had prompted a last-minute decision to add a short
east-west cross line of extra shot holes.

Granville Hogg gave scientists permission to blast on his property in
the hopes that it will reveal why the area's groundwater is limited.

Dashing up and down the line in his pick up, Powars veered off to soothe
a jittery landowner here, an overworked team member there.

"This is just so exciting," he jabbered, with no apparent need for a
breath. "We've waited so long. I can't wait to see what this thing looks
like. Everyone thought an impact this big would wipe out the planet.
Now, we know they were wrong. We're all so tired. No one knows what's
under there, you know. A crater like this is just so expensive to drill.
We know so little about them. Could be some oil down there, but I think
it's too young for that. Could be gold, platinum, diamonds. A crater in
Canada is pumping out nickel right now, you know."

By that night, even Powars was silenced by the explosions. Synchronized
by satellite-set timers, the blasts went off between 10:30 p.m and
sunrise to minimize vibrations from traffic that might be picked up by
the sensitive seismographs. Gravel and sandbags capped the shot holes,
directing the explosions downward to reveal the topography up to nine
miles beneath the surface. As they went off, a wave of mini-earthquakes
rocked the Shore.

Under foot, they rippled by with a rubbery jolt.

Inside homes, they rocked beds and rattled dishes.

Despite efforts to get the word out beforehand, many residents were
alarmed.

"Our dispatcher said she must have had 200 phone calls from folks
wanting to know what was going on," said Capt. David Doughty of the
county sheriff's department.

"I thought a car ran into my house," said Berkley Rayfield, a pharmacist
in Cape Charles. Others wondered if a plane had crashed, if the military
was up to something, if another meteor had hit, if Iraq had invaded.

"Me and my husband were up all night," said Cela Burge, Cape Charles'
town manager. "It really freaked us out."

A series of shallower, less-powerful explosions, set off during the day
, was expected to wrap up Sunday. From there, the recordings will be
entered into a computer and analyzed. Powars hopes to have a sketch of
his crater by December.

His hunch says the data will pinpoint Eyre Hall as the best spot for
next year's deep-hole project. The colonial-era plantation, located just
south of Eastville, belongs to Furlong Baldwin. Shot holes already dot
the property. The deep hole could bring an international circus of
science types to a place Baldwin treasures for its peace.

"I've already told David that we'll cross that bridge when we come to
it," Baldwin said. "If I can just get him to stop talking, I'll probably
agree to anything."
Received on Mon 11 Oct 2004 01:22:16 PM PDT