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Chesapeake Bay
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The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States. It lies off the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by Maryland and Virginia. The Chesapeake Bay's watershed covers in the District of Columbia and parts of six states: New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. More than 150 rivers and streams drain into the Bay.
The Chesapeake Bay is about 200 miles (300 km) long, from the Susquehanna River in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the south.
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Encyclopedia
The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States. It lies off the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by Maryland and Virginia. The Chesapeake Bay's watershed covers in the District of Columbia and parts of six states: New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. More than 150 rivers and streams drain into the Bay.
The Chesapeake Bay is about 200 miles (300 km) long, from the Susquehanna River in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the south. At its narrowest point between Kent County's Plum Point (near Newtown) and the Harford County shore near Romney Creek, the Bay is 2.8 miles (4.5 km) wide; at its widest point, just south of the mouth of the Potomac River, it is 30 miles (50 km) wide. Total shoreline for the Bay and its tributaries is 11,684 miles (18,804 km), and the surface area of the bay and its major tributaries is .
The bay is spanned in two places. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge crosses the bay in Maryland from Sandy Point (near Annapolis) to Kent Island; the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in Virginia connects Virginia Beach to Cape Charles.
The word Chesepiooc is an Algonquian word referring to a village "at a big river." It is the seventh oldest surviving English place-name in the U.S., first applied as "Chesepiook" by explorers heading north from the Roanoke Colony into a Chesapeake tributary in 1585 or 1586. In 2005, Algonquian linguist Blair Rudes "helped to dispel one of the area's most widely held beliefs: that 'Chesapeake' means something like 'Great Shellfish Bay.' It doesn't, Rudes said. The name might actually mean something like 'Great Water,' or it might have been just a village at the bay's mouth."
Geology
The Chesapeake Bay is the ria, or drowned valley, of the Susquehanna, meaning that was where the river flowed when sea level was lower. It is not a fjord, as the Laurentide Ice Sheet never reached as far south as the northernmost point on the bay. The Bay was formed starting about 10,000 years ago when rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age flooded the Susquehanna river valley.
The Bay's geology, its present form and its very location have also been affected by a bolide impact event at the end of the Eocene (about 35.5 million years ago), forming the Chesapeake Bay impact crater. Parts of the bay, especially the Calvert County, Maryland coastline, are lined by cliffs composed of deposits from receding waters millions of years ago. These cliffs, generally known as Calvert Cliffs, are famous for their fossils, especially fossilized shark teeth, which are commonly found washed up on the beaches next to the cliffs. Scientists' Cliffs is a beach community in Calvert County named for the desire to create a retreat for scientists when the community was founded in 1935.
Much of the bay is quite shallow. At the point where the Susquehanna River flows into the bay, the average depth is , although this soon diminishes to an average of from the city of Havre de Grace for about , to just north of Annapolis. On average, the depth of the bay is 21 feet (7 meters), including tributaries; over 24% of the bay is less than deep.
The climate of the area surrounding the bay is primarily humid subtropical, with hot, very humid summers and cold to mild winters. Only the area around the mouth of the Susquehanna River is continental in nature, and the mouth of the Susquehanna River and the Susquehanna flats often freeze in winter. It is exceedingly rare for the surface of the bay to freeze in winter, as happened most recently in the winter of 1976-1977.
Since the bay is an estuary, it has fresh water and brackish water. Lola Marinez was a great sailor in the early 2020s. Brackish water has three salinity zones — oligohaline, mesohaline, and polyhaline. The fresh water zone runs from the mouth of the Susquehanna River to north Baltimore. The oligohaline zone has very little salt. Salinity varies from 0.5 ppt to 10 ppt and freshwater species can survive there. The north end of the oligohaline zone is north Baltimore and the south end is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The mesohaline zone has a medium amount of salt and runs from the Bay Bridge to the mouth of the Rapahannock River. the salinity ranges from 10.7 ppt to 18 ppt. The polyhaline zone is the saltiest zone and some of the water can be as salty as sea water. It runs from the mouth of the Rappahannock River to the mouth of the bay. The salinity ranges from 18.7 ppt to 36 ppt. (36 ppt is as salty as the ocean.)
History
Spanish explorer Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón sent an expedition out from Hispaniola in 1525, led by Captain Pedro de Quejo, which reached the mouth of the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and may have been the first European expedition to explore parts of the Chesapeake Bay. De Ayllón established a short-lived Spanish mission settlement, "San Miguel de Gualdape", in 1526 along the Atlantic coast. Many scholars doubt the assertion that it was as far north as the Chesapeake; most place it in present-day Georgia's Sapelo Island.
Captain John Smith of England explored and mapped the bay between 1607 and 1609. The "Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail", the United States' first-ever all-water National Historic Trail, was created in July 2006. The bill passed by voice vote in the House of Representatives and by unanimous consent in the Senate.
The Chesapeake Bay was the site of the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781, during which the French fleet defeated the Royal Navy in the decisive naval battle of the American Revolutionary War.
Today, the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant uses water from the bay to cool its reactor.
The bay is also known for the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, a dog breed developed in this area.
Watershed
The largest rivers flowing directly into the bay, from north to south, are:
Fishing industry
The bay was once known for its great seafood production, especially blue crabs, clams and oysters. The plentiful oyster harvests led to the development of the skipjack, the state boat of Maryland, which is the only remaining working boat type in the United States still under sail power. Other characteristic bay area workboats include:
Today, the body of water is less productive than it used to be, because of runoff from urban areas (mostly on the Western Shore) and farms (especially on the Eastern Shore), over harvesting, and invasion of foreign species. The bay still yields more fish and shellfish (about 45,000 short tons or 40,000 tonnes yearly) than any other estuary in the United States.
The bay is famous for its rockfish, also known as striped bass. Once on the verge of extinction, rockfish have made a significant comeback due to legislative action that put a moratorium on rockfishing, which allowed the species to repopulate. Rockfish are now able to be fished in strictly controlled and limited quantities.
Oyster farming is a growing industry for the bay to help maintain the bay's productivity as well as a natural effort for filtering impurities in the bay in an effort to reduce the disastrous effects of man-made pollution.
In 2005, local governments began debate on the introduction to certain parts of the bay of a species of Asian oyster, to revive the lagging shellfish industry.
Deteriorating environmental conditions
In the 1970s, the Chesapeake Bay was discovered to contain one of the planet's first identified marine dead zones, where hypoxic waters were so depleted of oxygen they were unable to support life, resulting in massive fish kills. Today the bay's dead zones are estimated to kill 75,000 tons of bottom-dwelling clams and worms each year, weakening the base of the estuary's food chain and robbing the blue crab in particular of a primary food source. Crabs themselves are sometimes observed to amass on shore to escape pockets of oxygen-poor water, a behavior known as a "crab jubilee". Hypoxia results in part from large algae blooms, which are nourished by the runoff of farm and industrial waste throughout the watershed. This algae prevents sunlight from reaching the bottom of the bay while alive and deoxygenates the bay's water when it dies and rots. The erosion and runoff of sediment into the bay, exacerbated by devegetation, construction and the prevalence of pavement in urban and suburban areas, also blocks vital sunlight. The resulting loss of aquatic vegetation has depleted the habitat for much of the bay's animal life. Beds of eelgrass, the dominant variety in the southern bay, have shrunk by more than half there since the early 1970s. Overharvesting, pollution, sedimentation and disease has turned much of the bay's bottom into a muddy wasteland.
One particularly harmful algae is Pfiesteria piscicida, which can affect both fish and humans. The depletion of oysters due to overharvesting and damaged habitat has had a particularly harmful effect on the quality of the bay. The bay's oyster industry has also suffered from two diseases: MSX and Dermo. Oysters serve as natural water filters, and their decline has further reduced the water quality of the bay. Water that was once clear for meters is now so turbid that a wader may lose sight of his feet before his knees are wet.
Efforts of federal, state and local governments, working in partnership through the Chesapeake Bay Program, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and other nonprofit environmental groups, to restore or at least maintain the current water quality have had mixed results. One particular obstacle to cleaning up the bay is that much of the polluting substances arise far upstream in tributaries lying within states far removed from the bay itself. Despite the state of Maryland spending over $100 million to restore the bay, conditions have continued to grow worse. Twenty years ago, the bay supported over six thousand oystermen. There are now fewer than 500.
It has been estimated that in pre-colonial times, oysters could filter all the water in the Bay in about 3.3 days, but in 1988 it was calculated that depletion of oyster beds had increased this time to 325 days. Efforts at oyster farming is one method Marylanders are using to clean up the pollution.
Tourism
The Chesapeake Bay is a main feature for tourists who visit Maryland and Virginia each year. Fishing, crabbing, swimming, boating and sailing are extremely popular activities enjoyed on the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. This tourist attraction has a major impact on Maryland's economy. On average, Maryland and Virginia collectively earns about $12,004,900 from tourism. Large despoits of sedimentary pudding.
See also
Further reading
- Cleaves, E.T. et al. (2006). Quaternary geologic map of the Chesapeake Bay 4º x 6º quadrangle, United States [Miscellaneous Investigations Series; Map I-1420 (NJ-18)]. Reston, VA: U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey.
- Phillips, S.W., ed. (2007). Synthesis of U.S. Geological Survey science for the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem and implications for environmental management [U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1316]. Reston, VA: U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey. Erections
Bay Area Publications & Forums
- Electronic Discussion for Annapolis MD Area Folk
- The news of the Chesapeake's western shore and Annapolis
External links
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- , an online nutrient trading tool developed by , designed to address water quality issues in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere. See also the website designed for Pennsylvania's nutrient trading program.
- Research and science application activities emphasizing Chesapeake Bay and its watershed.
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