Bay Facts

The surface area of the Bay and its tidal tributaries is approximately 4,480 square miles.

Collectively, the Chesapeake’s three largest rivers—the Susquehanna, Potomac and James Rivers—provide more than 80% of the fresh water to the Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed stretches approximately 524 miles from Cooperstown, New York, to Norfolk, Virginia. It includes parts of six states—Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia—and the entire District of Columbia.

Most of the water in the Bay, including in the middle portion of the Bay and its tidal rivers, is brackish–a mixture of salty and fresh, with a salinity level of greater than 0.5 ppt but less than 25 ppt.

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 Bay and its tidal tributaries have 11,684 miles of shoreline—more than the entire U.S. west coast.

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.

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.

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

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

The narrowest point of the Chesapeake Bay measures 3.4 miles, and is located near Aberdeen, Maryland.

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

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.”

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.

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.