Chesapeake Bay Chesapeake Bay covers 4,480 square miles, has a coastline of 11,684 miles and contains more than 15 trillion gallons of brackish water. The north is on the right in this image. Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States and is one of the most productive bodies of water in the world. Enable JS and turn off any ad blocker.
Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the country and the third largest in the world. An estuary is a semi-enclosed coastal body of water with a free connection to the open ocean where fresh water from inland rivers mixes with saltwater from the ocean. Chesapeake Bay is the largest of the more than 100 estuaries in the United States. About half of the volume of water in the bay comes from saltwater in the Atlantic Ocean.
The other half flows into the bay from its enormous 64,000 square mile watershed. Because of this mix of fresh and salt water, the bay's salinity increases gradually as you move from north to south. The Chesapeake Bay Flotilla, which was built with shallow barges and ships to counter British naval attacks during the War of 1812. Growing concern about pollution also led the Maryland and Virginia legislatures to create the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory body, in 1980. 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).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.
Concern about the increasing discovery of pollution problems in the bays and the institutional challenges posed by organizing bay restoration programs over a large geographical area led Congress to order the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to assume a greater role in studying the scientific and technical aspects of the problems starting in the late 1970s. On average, the depth of the bay is 21 feet (6.4 m), including tributaries; more than 24 percent of the bay is less than 6 feet (2 m) deep. Response of a suspension-feeding benthic species (Crassostrea virginica Gmelin) to three centuries of eutrophication anthropogenic in Chesapeake Bay. The northern end of the Oligohaline Zone is north of Baltimore and the southern end is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
Some may not even have their own boats, let alone win regattas, but they are inexorably drawn to Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay watershed has been heavily affected by natural forces such as erosion, tides, and a history of hurricanes and other storms. I planned to spend my days sailing, eating as many blue crabs from Chesapeake Bay as possible and studying a little about the inhabitants of the East Coast. It is highly invasive and has the potential to flourish in the low-salinity tidal waters of Chesapeake Bay.
Chesapeake Bay and other estuaries serve as spawning and breeding grounds for two-thirds of the country's commercial fish and shellfish species. Algae prevent sunlight from reaching the bottom of the bay while they are alive and deoxygenate the water in the bay when it dies and rots. The European colonists who populated Chesapeake Bay in the late 17th and early 18th centuries brought industrial agricultural techniques with them. Over time, communities around Chesapeake Bay formed confederations such as Powhatan, Piscataway, and Nanticoke.