The Chesapeake Bay impact crater is a buried impact crater, located beneath the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, United States. It was formed by a bolide that struck the eastern shore of North America about 35.5 ± 0.3 million years ago, in the late Eocene epoch.

From the far reaches of space, a bolide (comet or asteroid), 3-5 kilometers in diameter, swooped through the Earth's atmosphere and blasted an enormous crater into the continental shelf.

Jul 1, 1999 · About 35 million years ago, a large comet or meteor slammed into the shallow shelf on the western margin of the Atlantic Ocean, creating the Chesapeake Bay impact crater. This report, the second in a series, refines the geologic framework of southeastern Virginia, south of the James River in and near the impact crater, and presents evidence for ...

Aug 15, 2019 · About 35 million years ago, an asteroid traveling nearly 144,000 mph (231,000 km/h) smashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the modern-day town of Cape Charles, Virginia.

What and Where is the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater? For the first of these four themes, David said: “Starting off, there’s been a long history of this investigation” into the possibility of a meteoric impact hitting the Chesapeake Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay crater is an 85 km impact structure formed during the late Eocene, about 35.4 million years ago. It is one of the largest known and best studied impact craters on Earth.

The geology of the impact target area consisted of three layers: an upper layer of seawater; a middle layer of sediments; and a lower layer of igneous and metamor-phic rocks, called basement rocks. The impact structure also consists of three parts: (1) a central crater, which, upon impact, briefly existed as a hole (transient crater) that was ...

Aug 8, 2019 · Its impact formed a 25-mile diameter crater that now lies buried beneath the Chesapeake Bay, an estuary in Virginia and Maryland. From this impact, the nearby area experienced fires, earthquakes, falling molten glass droplets, an air blast and a …

Sep 23, 2013 · About 35 million years ago, a bolide (a comet or asteroid) about 1-3 miles wide slammed into the ocean off the eastern edge of the North American continent. Its impact formed a 25-mile diameter crater that now lies buried beneath the Chesapeake Bay.

The sixth largest impact crater on Earth, the Chesapeake Bay crater affects almost 2 million people living in the region — through subsidence, faulting and the presence of saline groundwater.