World-class museums, thriving arts and cultural districts, history, nightlife, music and more make Baltimore the urban jewel of Chesapeake Bay. Chesapeake Bay is an estuary in the North Atlantic, which extends between the Delmarva Peninsula to the east and the North American mainland to the west. It is the estuary, or drowned valley, of the Susquehanna River, meaning that it was the floodplain through which the river flowed when the sea level was lower. It's not a fjord, because the Laurentide ice sheet never reached as far south as the northernmost point of the bay. North of Baltimore, the western coast borders the mountainous region of Piedmont in Maryland; to the south of the city, the bay is located within the state's low coastal plain, with sedimentary cliffs to the west and flat islands, meandering streams, and swamps to the east.
The large rivers that enter the bay from the west have wide mouths and are extensions of the main estuary for several kilometers along the course of each river. Baltimore is the main port in the upper (north) part of the bay. The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal connects the headwaters of the bay to the Delaware River estuary. The Hampton Roads port group, around Norfolk, Virginia, at the mouth of the James River, exports coal and tobacco.
A major naval base is located in Norfolk. The Chesapeake Bay watershed has been heavily affected by natural forces such as erosion, tides, and a history of hurricanes and other storms. In the 1970s, Chesapeake Bay was discovered to contain one of the first identified marine dead zones on the planet, where the waters were so depleted of oxygen that they could not support life, causing the massive death of fish. The arrival of the English colonists Sir Walter Raleigh and Humphrey Gilbert in the late 16th century to found a colony, which was later established on Roanoke Island (off the current coast of North Carolina) for the Virginia Company, marked the first time that the English approached the gates of Chesapeake Bay, between the capes of Cape Charles and Cape Henry.
Chesapeake Bay plays an extremely important role in the economies of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, in addition to the ecosystem. It is highly invasive and has the potential to flourish in the low-salinity tidal waters of Chesapeake Bay. Some may not even have their own boats, let alone win regattas, but Chesapeake Bay attracts them inexorably. A good example of how different Chesapeake Bay sites experience different tides can be seen in the tide predictions published by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (see figure on the right).
The Chesapeake Bay Flotilla, which was built with shallow barges and ships to counter British naval attacks during the War of 1812. Individual, population, and ecosystem effects of hypoxia in a dominant benthic bivalve in Chesapeake Bay. Growing concern about pollution also led the Maryland and Virginia legislatures to establish the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory body, in 1980. During the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the bay was crisscrossed by passenger steamboats and package lines that connected the different cities of the bay, in particular the Baltimore Steam Packet Company (Old Bay Line). I planned to spend my days sailing, eating as many blue crabs from Chesapeake Bay as possible and studying a little about the locals on the East Coast.
That same year, it sank in the Potomac River, off Chesapeake Bay, after a high-powered test organized by the U. Starting in 1978, numerous expeditions were launched in the hope of successfully discovering what was left of the Chesapeake Bay flotilla. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which connects Virginia's east coast to its mainland (in the Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Chesapeake metropolitan areas), is approximately 20 miles (32 km) long; it has trestle bridges and two two-mile-long (3.2 km) sections of tunnels that allow unimpeded transportation; the bridge is supported by four 5.25-acre (21,200 m) artificial islands. In September 1781, during the War of Independence, the British sank more than a dozen ships in the York River, near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.