Do you have your facts straight about
where your watershed is located? Everyone in the world lives in a watershed. We
live in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Our watershed is 64,000 square miles
with 11,684 miles of shoreline. Over 18 million people live in the Chesapeake
Bay Watershed, which spans across parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Delaware, Virginia and DC. A few major cities in the watershed are
Washington, DC, Baltimore, Annapolis, Richmond, Norfolk, Charlottesville and
Cooperstown. The watershed is also home to over 2,700
different plant and animal species. More than 100,000 streams, creeks and rivers flow through the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, and each of the streams, creeks and rivers has its own mini watershed called a sub watershed. These small sub
watersheds ultimately join together to create the Chesapeake Bay Watershed,
which flows into the Chesapeake Bay and from there into the Atlantic Ocean.
Major
rivers in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed include Susquehanna River, Potomac River, Rappahannock River, York River, James River. Did you know the Chesapeake Bay
Watershed is an estuary – a body of water where fresh and saltwater mix. It is the
largest of more than 100 estuaries in the United States and third largest in
the world. The Chesapeake Bay itself holds more than 18 trillion
gallons of water or about 27 million Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of
water. The Bay would hold a lot more water except it's usually very shallow.
The average depth in the Bay is only about 21 feet.
But remember, a watershed is more than just the water around us, it's also the
air we breathe and the places we live, work and play.
We also share it with the wildlife, birds and plants. I'm going to leave you with something to
think about.
