Bay Facts

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

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.

Water temperatures in the Bay fluctuate widely throughout the year, dropping as low as 34 degrees in winter.

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.”

The Chesapeake Bay’s land-to-water ratio is 14:1: the largest of any coastal water body in the world. This is why our actions on land have such a big impact on the Bay’s health.

There were many different tribes in the region before Europeans arrived, but the dominant group were Algonquian speakers known collectively as the Powhatan tribes.

There are nearly 1,800 local governments in the Bay watershed, including towns, cities, counties and townships.

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

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

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

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

At filter feeders, oysters can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day.

There are as many as 200 invasive species present in the Chesapeake Bay watershed that are causing some serious issues in an already-stressed ecosystem. Some examples include blue catfish, snakehead, zebra mussel, purple loosestrife, and nutria.

The mouth of the Chesapeake Bay is about 12 miles wide between its northern point near Cape Charles, Virginia, and its southern point close to Cape Henry, Virginia.

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

The Bay receives about half its water volume from the Atlantic Ocean in the form of saltwater. The other half (freshwater) drains into the Bay from the enormous 64,000-square-mile watershed.

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.