C. Wylie Poag, a scientiest with the United States Geological Survey, describes a meteorite that crashed into the Chesapeake Bay 35 million years ago.
Chesapeake Invader is a difficult read, as Poag adopts a pedagogic writing style that lacks the grace and fluidity of a science writer experienced in writing books for the public.
Rather than putting the meteorite’s impact in either social or geographic perspective, Poag focuses on the technical details of geology, submarine stratification, tsunami and extinction. The later two topics were well developed and offered the most interesting reading.
The details were presented in a clear, systematic manner that, I judge, would be too simplistic for a geologist, yet were presented out of social context, leaving them to be less interesting to the general reader.
Recommendation: Read if you have a particular interst in the subject.
