Effects On Local Rivers
The continual slumping of the rubble within the crater has affected the flow of the rivers and shaped the Chesapeake Bay. The impact crater created a long-lasting topographic depression, which helped predetermine the course of local rivers and the eventual location of Chesapeake Bay. Most important for present-day inhabitants of the area, the impact disrupted aquifers. The present freshwater aquifers lie above a deep salty brine, making the entire lower Chesapeake Bay area susceptible to groundwater contamination.
The crater is also one factor contributing to the sinking of land near the Chesapeake Bay. For example, Hampton Roads is gradually sinking at a rate between 15 and 23 centimeters (5 and 7.5 inches) per century. This is occurring because of the slippage of the coast into the crater and groundwater removal, counteracting “isostatic rebound” of the crust of the earth from the weight of long absent glaciers.
Read more about this topic: Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater
Famous quotes containing the words effects, local and/or rivers:
“One of the effects of a safe and civilised life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing laughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name.”
—Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 5, Yale University Press (1961)
“Like an unseasonable stormy day,
Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores,
As if the world were all dissolved to tears,
So high above his limits swells the rage
Of Bolingbroke.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)