The mouth of the bay at its southern point is located between Cape Henry and Cape Charles. More than major rivers and streams flow into the bay's 64,square-mile , km 2 drainage basin , which covers parts of six states New York , Pennsylvania , Delaware , Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia and all of Washington, D. The bay is approximately miles km long from its northern headwaters in the Susquehanna River to its outlet in the Atlantic Ocean.
It is 2. Total shoreline including tributaries is 11, miles 18, km , circumnavigating a surface area of 4, square miles 11, km 2. Average depth is 21 feet 6. Known for both its beauty and bounty, the bay has become "emptier", with fewer crabs, oysters and watermen fishermen since the midth century.
Restoration efforts that began in the s have continued into the 21st century and show potential for growth of the native oyster population. The word Chesepiooc is an Algonquian word referring to a village 'at a big river'. It is the seventh-oldest surviving English placename in the United States, first applied as Chesepiook by explorers heading north from the Roanoke Colony into a Chesapeake tributary in or The name may also refer to the Chesapeake people or the Chesepian, a Native American tribe who inhabited the area now known as South Hampton Roads in the U.
It does not, Rudes said. The name might have actually meant something like 'great water', or it might have just referred to a village location at the bay's mouth.
It is the ria , or drowned valley, of the Susquehanna River , meaning that it was the alluvial plain where the river flowed when the sea level was lower. It is not a fjord , because the Laurentide Ice Sheet never reached as far south as the northernmost point on the bay. North of Baltimore , the western shore borders the hilly Piedmont region of Maryland; south of the city the bay lies within the state's low-lying coastal plain , with sedimentary cliffs to the west, and flat islands, winding creeks and marshes to the east.
