Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater

This may have contributed to the immiseration and decline of the Jamestown colony, some thirty-five million years later:

"Chesapeake Bay is the remains of a giant meteor crater. The impact shattered rock for miles, letting seawater infiltrate. Few Indian groups lived in the saltwater wedge, presumably for just that reason. Jamestown was bordered and undergirded by bad water. That bad water, the geographer Carville V. Earle argued, led to 'typhoid, dysentery, and perhaps salt poisoning.' By January 1608, eight months after landfall, only thirty-eight [of the original 144] English were left alive."

From Charles Mann's "1493", which is a fantastic read; it's full of satisfying connections between environmental and historical forces like the above.

The crater and the resulting aquifer disruption is a contributing factor to why several nearby cities import their water from far away. Another is that the cities of Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Newport News acquired water rights to nearby creeks long ago, back when nearby jurisdictions were rural counties, so by the time other areas experienced growth, all of their surface water rights were already owned by the oldest cities [1].

Caught in a wave of post-war growth, white flight, threatened by annexation, and discontent with having to buy local water from their neighbors, counties in this part of Virginia started becoming cities. In Virginia, cities are independent from counties -- the federal government therefore considers Virginia cities to be county-equivalent -- and cities are protected from annexation by adjacent cities.

Counties turned into cities, then merged with an adjacent friendly city to avoid annexation by a rival city; Princess Anne County merged into the City of Virginia Beach; Norfolk County merged with the City of South Norfolk and renamed itself to Chesapeake; Nansemond County changed into a city, then a year and half later merged into the City of Suffolk; the county surrounding the City of Hampton merged back into it; and the City of Newport News eventually merged by mutual agreement with the City of Warwick, even though 6 years prior Warwick changed from a county to a city to avoid that exact fate.

After experiencing major growth, Virginia Beach wanted to have a better negotiating position with Norfolk over water supply. It build a long interbasin transfer [1][2] to withdraw water from Lake Gaston on the Roanoke River, adjacent to the North Carolina border. Chesapeake joined as a minority partner. The resulting water is delivered into to Norfolk's system, who filters and treats it, and distributes it to Norfolk, Virginia Beach, the most urbanized areas of Chesapeake, and most military bases in the area.

[1] http://www.virginiaplaces.org/watersheds/lakegaston.html [2] https://www.vbgov.com/government/departments/public-utilitie...

It amazes me that these events seem "frequent" when you look at them overall, but then extremely rare when you realise how far apart some of them are (millions and millions of years). It really makes you realise just how small a window of time human existence has been given. We may see one or two major geological events in all of human histroy if we're lucky (or unlucky, depending on what they are!).

Looking at this map[1] of known impact craters, it looks like of the landmasses, eastern Canada, (western) Australia and northern Eurasia have experienced the most impacts and Africa, China and South America have experienced the fewest (Antarctica largely unknown).

Now one thing which the map doesn’t represent is the position (coöperdinates) of the affected landmass at time of impact.

[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Earth_Im...

Debris from the impact made it all the way to Texas! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bediasite

I live just along the outer rim area. What’s amazing is that I have yet to run into anyone in this area who knows about the crater structure beneath their feet!