THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Tuesday, September 24, 1996           TAG: 9609240329
SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER 
DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   41 lines

SCIENTIST WILL LECTURE AT ODU ON HIS THEORY OF BAY'S FORMATION

The theory goes something like this: About 35 million years ago, where Cape Charles now sits on Virginia's Eastern Shore, a huge meteorite smashed into the Earth.

Tidal waves raged. Boulders flew through the air, landing as far away as New Jersey and Texas. And the deep, black hole created by the impact shaped the Chesapeake Bay.

The chief scientist behind this unconventional theory, C. Wylie Poag, of the U.S Geological Survey in Massachusetts, will be in Norfolk Thursday to discuss his research and its modern-day implications.

Poag's speech, free to the public, will begin at 8 p.m. in the auditorium of the Mills Godwin Jr. Building, on the campus of Old Dominion University. His talk is part of ODU's President's Science Lecture Series.

Author of more than 200 abstracts, articles and books, Poag has helped identify two prehistoric meteorite strikes in the United States. A 1994 paper he co-authored on one such hit in southeastern Virginia has stirred much debate about the origin of the Bay and has reinvigorated the often esoteric study of sediments, rocks and fault lines in the lower Chesapeake.

While other geologists may dispute some of Poag's conclusions, most agree that he helped settle a mystery first detected in the 1940s and '50s, when groundwater samples showed that something big and something traumatic happened in the lower Bay millions of years ago.

``There's no question there was a meteoric hit,'' said Gerald Johnson, a geologist at the College of William and Mary, who will present his own research of the impact to colleagues next month in Denver.

As proof, Johnson notes his and Poag's research showing jagged fault lines in core samples, unusually jumbled sediments and sharp geologic drops in a wide ring. Each signals that a gaping hole, perhaps 50 miles across, was created suddenly and furiously some 35 million years ago in a quiet, shallow sea that flooded modern-day Tidewater and stretched to Richmond.

Johnson, however, is not willing to go as far as Poag does - that the meteorite formed the Bay. Johnson believes instead that the huge rock from space, estimated to have been one mile in diameter, was one of several causes. by CNB