The Chesapeake Bay is an example of a drowned river valley and formed when sea levels rose to flood large coastal river valleys. The other types form as follows: Glacial fjord: a glacier carves its way toward the ocean, forming deep, narrow valleys that fill in when sea levels rise.
What is Chesapeake Bay known for?
The Chesapeake Bay has the largest land-to-water ratio (14:1) of any coastal water body in the world. More than 100,000 streams and rivers thread through the watershed and eventually flow into the Bay. Everyone within the Chesapeake Bay watershed is just minutes from one of the streams or rivers.
What type of ecosystem is the Chesapeake Bay?
estuary
The Chesapeake Bay is an estuary (leaving MDE) and is the largest ecosystem of its kind in the United States. Estuaries are partially enclosed coastal bodies of water that occur where freshwater from streams and rivers mixes with saltwater from the ocean.
What type of estuary is the Chesapeake Bay?
coastal plain estuaries
The Chesapeake Bay on the East Coast of the United States and Coos Estuary on the West Coast are both coastal plain estuaries. These, and most other coastal plain estuaries in North America, were formed at the end of the last ice age between 10,000-18,000 years ago.
Is the Chesapeake Bay a watershed?
The Chesapeake Bay watershed, or draingage basin, encompasses six states – New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. A drainage basin is a giant system of creeks, streams, and rivers that all flow into a common outlet, which in this case is the Chesapeake Bay.
Why is the Chesapeake Bay so important?
It is one of the most productive estuaries in the world, with over 3,600 species of animals and plants. The bay provides vitally important habitats for wildlife, lots of recreational opportunities for people, and is an important fishery upon which both people and wildlife depend.
What are 5 facts about the Chesapeake Bay?
10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Chesapeake Bay
- The Bay holds about 18 trillion gallons of water.
- Only about half of the water in the Bay comes from the ocean.
- Roughly 51 billion gallons of water enter the Bay each day from the 100,000 streams, creeks, and rivers that feed it.
Why is the Chesapeake Bay an estuary?
Based on its geology, the Chesapeake Bay is classified as a coastal plain estuary or a drowned river estuary because it began life when rising sea levels flooded into its major tributary following the end of the last ice age.
What is in the ecosystem?
An ecosystem is a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and landscape, work together to form a bubble of life. Ecosystems contain biotic or living, parts, as well as abiotic factors, or nonliving parts. Biotic factors include plants, animals, and other organisms.
What ecosystem services does the Chesapeake Bay provide?
In the context of the Blueprint and Chesapeake Bay water quality, however, we focus on eight ecosystem services that we believed would be the most affected by implementing the Blueprint: food production (crops, livestock, and fish), climate stability, air pol- lution treatment, water supply, water regulation, waste
What is an example of estuary?
The Chesapeake Bay in Maryland is a large estuary. The bays surrounding the boroughs of New York City are also estuaries. San Francisco Bay in California and Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana are other examples of large, developed estuaries.
What are the 4 types of estuaries?
There are four different kinds of estuaries, each created a different way: 1) coastal plain estuaries; 2) tectonic estuaries; 3) bar-built estuaries; and 4) fjord estuaries. Coastal plain estuaries (1) are created when sea levels rise and fill in an existing river valley.
Is the Chesapeake Bay a salt wedge estuary?
The Chesapeake Bay watershed is characterized by rapidly flowing rivers discharging to the bay where tidal currents are weak. This creates the most stratified or least mixed type of estuary (as classified by water circulation) – a salt-wedge.
What types of water does a watershed include?
The watershed consists of surface water–lakes, streams, reservoirs, and wetlands–and all the underlying groundwater. Larger watersheds contain many smaller watersheds. It all depends on the outflow point; all of the land that drains water to the outflow point is the watershed for that outflow location.
What is the largest watershed in the US?
the Mississippi River Watershed
The largest watershed in the United States is the Mississippi River Watershed, which drains 1.15 million square miles from all or parts of 31 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces stretching from the Rockies to the Appalachians!
What is the largest watershed in America?
The Mississippi River watershed
The Mississippi River watershed is the biggest watershed in the United States, draining more than three million square kilometers (one million square miles) of land. The Mississippi River watershed stretches from the Appalachian Mountains in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west.
Who benefits from the Chesapeake Bay?
In 2009 (before the Blueprint) the lands and waters of the Chesapeake Bay Region provided economic benefits totaling $107.2 billion annually. These benefits include air and water filtering, agricultural and seafood production, enhancement of property values, and protection from floods and hurricanes.
How does the Chesapeake Bay affect the economy?
The Chesapeake Bay strengthens the area’s fishing, tourism, and real estate industries, generating economic and recreational benefits estimated at about $33 billion a year (“Cleaning Up the Chesapeake Bay”); however, these industries have suffered as a result of the degradation of the Bay area’s ecosystems and of the
What are the main products that come out of the Chesapeake Bay?
The Bay’s Fisheries and Seafood Industry
- Oysters:The Chesapeake is one of very few places left in the world where an industry exists based on harvesting oysters from the wild.
- Blue Crabs: Just like the oyster, the blue crab is critical to the Chesapeake’s culture and economy.
How did Chesapeake Bay get its name?
The namesake for our Bay could stem from a variety of places. The word Chesepiooc is an Algonquian word referring to a village “at a big river.” The name “Chesapeake” may refer to the Chesepian or Chesapeake people, a Native American tribe who inhabited the area surrounding what is now known as Hampton Roads, Virginia.
Are there sharks in the Chesapeake Bay?
The answer to the question is, yes. At least 12 species of sharks are known to visit parts of the Bay, and can be found here between summer and fall.