Something New About Something Very Old

"You learn something new everyday," is a common saying that many attribute to little imbues of random unknown knowledge. Similar to the phrase "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," I believe this to be true. As an aspiring story teller and journalist, I try to keep my knowledge of current events as up-to-date as possible. I often find myself spending hours on the web wandering around Reddit, or scrolling through articles on different news sites. It's not very often, however, that I spend my time reading up on things that happened a long time ago. That's not to say that I don't love a good Charlotte Brontë novel, or that I'm not highly anticipating the movie release of "The Book Theif". Nonetheless, history is in a sense unknown territory for this curious cat.

Being away from home for school has seemed to strengthen my allegiance towards my roots. I put more Old Bay on my food then I used to, I proudly tell anyone who cares (and some who don't) why Maryland is the best state in the land, and sometimes doodle our amazing state flag or blue crabs in my notebook during class. So I was naturally intrigued by this new study found talking about 145-million year old seawater found beneath the Chesapeake Bay! You can find the study here, but if you don't feel like doing all the reading, I am thoroughly prepared to give you a summary.

In short,  groundwater was found more than 3,200 feet deep under the Chesapeake Bay. It is said that the water found was twice as salty as modern seawater. What makes this study interesting is that the existence of this ancient aquifer was so unlikely. Like most large bodies of water, I learned, the Chesapeake Bay was also created by an oceanic impact crater more than 35 million years ago, and the impact of the comet would have broken up and destroyed existing arrangements of aquifers. Post bolide disruption, a large, salty, newly porous reservoir, now exists, and it is said that this reservoir greatly limits the availability of freshwater in the area. Supposedly, many Geohydrologists have known of this underground water for decades, but this recent study is the only one that has been able to grasp the history of it all.

My beautiful backyard.
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