Bay Facts

Two of the United States’ five major North Atlantic ports—Baltimore and Hampton Roads—are on the Bay.

Legislation proposed by Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative John Sarbanes to incorporate the bay into the nation’s park system.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed contains three distinct geologic regions: the Atlantic coastal plain, the Piedmont plateau and the Appalachian province.

The Susquehanna River watershed includes nearly 50 thousand miles of rivers, streams and creeks.

Eighty-six percent of watershed residents believe if people work together, water pollution can be fixed.

Salinity is highest at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where water from the Atlantic Ocean enters.

The Bay produces about 500 million pounds of seafood per year.

More than 1,800 vessels have met their end in Bay waters, lying broken and battered on the Bay's floor.

At 4,863 feet above sea level, Spruce Knob is the highest point in the Chesapeake watershed.

The word Chesepiooc is an Algonquian word referring to a village "at a big river." In 2005, Algonquian historian Blair Rudes helped dispel the widely-held belief that the name meant “great shellfish bay.”

There are 6,282,718 acres of accessible green space within the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Half of pet owners always pick up after their pet, but one-third of pet owners seldom or never do so. Pet waste contains bacteria that can harm human health and contaminate the water we use for drinking, swimming and fishing.

The area of the watershed is about 64,000 square miles.

Forty-six percent of watershed residents never use toxic pesticides in or around their homes. You can evaluate a pesticide’s toxicity to judge the risk in using it, or make your own non-toxic pesticide with garlic, vinegar, cooking oil and other common household items.

The Bay is surprisingly shallow. Its average depth, including all tidal tributaries, is about 21 feet. A person who is six feet tall could wade through more than 700,000 acres of the Bay and never get his or her hat wet.

The Bay itself is about 200 miles long, stretching from Havre de Grace, Maryland, to Virginia Beach, Virginia.

While one-third of watershed residents have volunteered their time or donated their money to a charitable organization, less than two in ten volunteers have done so for an environmental organization.

The Chesapeake Bay holds more than 18 trillion gallons of water.