San Francisco Bay? 1,600 square miles, maximum. For starters, our 4479-square-mile Chesapeake is eight times larger than the 550-square-mile San Francisco Bay.
To put it in perspective, it's roughly the size of the Virginia portion of the Chesapeake River, from the south coast of the Potomac and Pocomoke Sound to the Chesapeake Bay bridge-tunnel.
I could keep quoting media, government leaders, agencies, non-profit groups and others, not to mention the crossword puzzle from the New York Times. Chesapeake Bay is widely viewed as the largest estuary in the United States, and Puget Sound is often referred to as the second largest or sometimes the largest estuary by volume, since Puget Sound is much deeper than the Chesapeake.Other places highlighted on some lists include San Francisco Bay and the Albemarle-Pamlica estuary in North Carolina. Since Chesapeake Bay doesn't fluctuate much, the figure of 4,480 square miles is a pretty good estimate during any tidal period. The “classic definition” of an estuary used by the EPA dates back to 1952 and is attributed to an oceanographer who studied Chesapeake Bay, according to Michael Fincham in Chesapeake Quarterly. For its average depth, Puget Sound is about 230 feet, Cook Inlet is 147 feet, and Chesapeake Bay is 21 feet.
Explorers discovered Chesapeake as early as 1524, more than 200 years before the first accounts of explorers discovering San Francisco Bay. I recently discovered a podcast series from a few years ago called BayWide, which explores various topics related to the Chesapeake Bay. We all hear people from San Francisco say they are from the “Bay Area”, but with more than three dozen bays in the United States, one may wonder why only one bears this nickname.