During the past decade, the massive worldwide conversion of learning content from print and other older media on to digital networks has created gatekeepers who limit access to their digital content or require online users to pay for it.

A variety of gatekeepers have made a third choice:
to open their content freely into the Internet.
These are their stories.

August 17 , 2006

The Chesapeake Bay Bolide
U.S. Geological Survey

Images from the website illustrations

The event this website describes happened about 35 million years ago. The website has not been changed since 1997. For almost ten years the information provided here has been open and free definitive content available to anyone on earth with access to the Internet. The age of the website is illustrates that well-built online material about static subjects can be maintained at almost no effort or cost.

The quality of the content in these bolide pages is authenticated by the fact that they are hosted online by the U.S. Geological Survey and Woods Hole Science Center. Enriching the content is the fact that it is the work of C. Wylie Poag, who undoubtedly knows more than anyone else about the bolide. When he was inducted in 2003 as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science his work was described in these words:

Wylie is a research geologist with the USGS in Woods Hole, MA. His 40-year geological career includes experience as a petroleum explorationist, a university professor, and a project coordinator for the National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project. His USGS research emphasizes the integration of subsurface geophysical, geological, and paleontological data to reconstruct the stratigraphic framework and depositional history of the Atlantic and Gulf Coast margins of the United States. He has published more than 250 abstracts, articles, and books on these topics.

A recent highlight of his research has been documentation of the largest impact crater in the United States, buried beneath the lower part of Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding peninsulas. As a result of his crater research, Wylie received the Thomas Jefferson Medal from the Virginia Museum of Natural History Foundation. The Baltimore Sun selected his popular book on this topic (Chesapeake Invader: Discovering America's Giant Meteorite Crater) as one of the best books published in 1999 on the Chesapeake Bay area. The book also earned for Wylie the USGS' Eugene M. Shoemaker Award for Communication Product Excellence for the year 2000.

Open content on the Internet is of extremely high quality when it is formed by a knowledgeable source who is passionate about the subject. The contrast in cost is one of the grand surprises of the online age: the world can learn from the top expert in a field virtually for free.

Is Dr. Poag's work dense and remote? It is absolutely the opposite: clear and colorful. What is a bolide? He tells us:

There is no consensus on its definition, but we use it to mean an extraterrestrial body in the 1-10-km size range, which impacts the earth at velocities of literally faster than a speeding bullet (20-70 km/sec = Mach 75), explodes upon impact, and creates a large crater. "Bolide" is a generic term, used to imply that we do not know the precise nature of the impacting body . . . whether it is a rocky or metallic asteroid, or an icy comet, for example.