Here’s one for my friends in Edenton, North Carolina, the “South’s Prettiest Small Town.” Situated on the peaceful shores of the Albemarle Sound, Edenton is just a few miles from one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of the planet. It made me wonder: What would happen to the town if the disaster occurred today?
It’s hard to believe that idyllic Edenton is situated just 70 miles from the site of an apocalypse that obliterated half the continent. How many Edentonians realize when they drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, they are actually driving across the remains of an 80-mile-wide impact crater formed when an asteroid smashed into the coast 35 million years ago?
I recently stumbled across ImpactEarth.com, a website developed by space scientists that allows you to simulate what you would experience if an asteroid hit the earth near your location. In a fit of very morbid curiosity, I punched in the location of Edenton and selected the parameters for the Chesapeake impact. The results were eye-opening. Even though it was only about a third as big as the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs, the mile-wide Chesapeake asteroid still managed to annihilate an impressive swath of North America.
I’m a fan of disaster movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon, and I wondered how Edenton would fare if, instead of the ancient past, the Chesapeake asteroid strike happened today. Based on the information from the EarthImpact website, here’s my guess at what you would experience if you were sitting on a bench in downtown Edenton, just outside Waterman’s Grill. Be forewarned, in great disaster-movie style, it doesn’t end well for our beautiful little town.
THE STRIKE
It’s a clear November morning, the leaves are turning yellow and the weather is cool. You’re watching a flock of geese fly over Edenton Bay when you see a blinding flash and a column of smoke streak across the sky. The asteroid has punched into the atmosphere at 70,000 miles per hour. It only takes an instant for it to vanish over the trees at the north end of Broad Street.
THE FIREBALL
For a moment nothing happens. Then, 1.5 seconds after the rock slams into the Chesapeake Bay, a massive fireball silently rises in the distance over North Broad Street. The heat from the fireball is painfully intense. The paint begins to sear on the exposed north side of the Cupola House and the garden bursts into flame. The fireball over the Chesapeake is 18 miles wide and even at this distance emits enough heat to ignite plywood and cause instant third-degree burns. You manage to avoid serious injury by ducking around the south corner of the building, where you witness the water in Edenton Bay begin to boil.
THE GROUND SHOCKWAVE
The heat grows more intense as the curiously-silent fireball rises higher in the sky. Unknown to you a massive shockwave is rippling through the earth’s crust toward Edenton. It arrives thirty seconds after the impact with the power of an 8.5-magnitude earthquake. The Roanoke River lighthouse rocks on its pilings and you are thrown from your feet just as the chimneys collapse from the sides of the Barker House. The marble soldier at the top of the Confederate Memorial topples to the ground and the cannons in front of the Courthouse Green are jolted from their concrete mounts and bounce into the boiling water. The roar is deafening, it hides the sounds of the windows shattering in most of the homes of the historic district.
THE EJECTA
Two minutes later, the bedrock thrown from the crater by the force of the blast (almost 5 cubic miles of stone) begins to rain down on Edenton. For the next three minutes, a dense blanket of semi-molten, baseball-sized rocks and debris blankets the town, blocking the light from the still-rising fireball and causing even more fires. The weight of the falling material overwhelms the flat rooftops of the Broad Street buildings, and they begin to collapse around you. The town is buried beneath a 16-inch thick layer of rock and ash.
THE AIR BLAST
Somehow you’re still alive to experience the arrival of the air blast eight minutes after impact. The previous destruction from the heat of the fireball, the earthquake, and the raining lava is nothing compared to what happens when the 750 mile-per-hour blast wave slams into the town. The massive concrete Chowan River Bridge is tossed into the river like a child’s toy. The historic Edenton Courthouse crumbles and is blasted into Edenton Bay just before the boiling waters of the bay themselves are pushed far out toward Plymouth, exposing the muddy bottom of the Albemarle Sound. Almost every structure in town is leveled, almost every tree is downed. Those few trees that still stand are completely stripped of branches and leaves.
Amazingly, you are still unhurt. You pick yourself up and for the next thirty minutes wander around the ruins of the town. Nothing recognizable remains, only irregular piles of debris blanketed by the volcanic rock and ash that still rains from above. The sky is utterly black, and the only light comes from intense lightning and the burning remains of the wood-frame homes of the historic district. You realize that you are amazingly lucky to have survived.
THE TSUNAMI
Unfortunately, your luck is about to run out. The impact-generated tsunami arrives about 45 minutes after impact. You don’t see it coming because the smoke and ash block your vision, but you hear it a few moments before it strikes, a solid wall of water almost 200 feet high. It lifts you and everything that was once in Edenton–the buildings, the monuments, the trees and cars and inhabitants–and sweeps it all far out into the Atlantic, leaving behind a featureless mud flat where once stood the South’s Prettiest Town.
THE AFTERMATH
If the Chesapeake Bay impact happened today, not only does Edenton perish, but so does every city and town on the east coast from Boston to Miami. The tsunami washes inland to the Blue Ridge mountains and rock ejected from the crater falls as far away as Antarctica. Ash darkens the skies over the entire world for many years, causing an endless winter, crop failures, and mass starvation. Basically, it’s the end of the world as we know it.
Whew! Like I said, we’re lucky we weren’t around when all of the above actually happened 35 million years ago. The next time you visit Busch Gardens or Williamsburg or Jamestown, remember that the rough circle of rolling hills and ridges around you are actually the edges of the ancient, 80-mile-wide meteor crater. Could it happen again? The odds are against it, but as a highly-destructive meteorite in Russia recently demonstrated, no place on Earth is completely safe from this disaster-movie scenario.
