The Chesapeake is large. It's 8,000 miles of shorelines 
would extend from the U.S.-Canadian border to the U.S.-Mexican 
border, along the Atlantic and Gulf coastline of the United 
States. 
Its 4,400 square miles of surface area makes it the largest 
estuary in the continental United States. 
The 450 miles long Susquehanna River is the largest fresh¬ 
water system to discharge on the east coast of the United States 
and the largest to discharge from Eastern North America into the 
Atlantic Ocean Basin except for the St. Lawrence. The Chesa¬ 
peake is a very large system. 
So whether it's large or small depends in part on the per¬ 
spective from which you view the system. I hope that you keep 
the perspective that in some cases it's a very large system and 
in other it's a very small system, but in all cases it's a very 
important system. 
The modern Chesapeake originated during the last rise in sea 
level, which probably began on the order of 12,000 or 13,000 
years ago. In Figure 2, we present a sea level rise curve for 
the Delmarva Peninsula. The data from which it was constructed 
are coastal areas on the Delmarva Peninsula are verified in the 
Chesapeake System by dates on peats which are found buried over 
wide geographic areas in the Chesapeake. Sea level was on the 
order of 20 meters below its present elevation approximately 
8,000 years ago, about the time that the proto Chesapeake Bay in 
its present geographic configuration was flooded by this rise in 
sea level. 
The Chesapeake has a remnant Pleistocene channel in it. 
This remnant Pleistocene channel, created when sea level was 
standing at some lower elevation than at the present time, 
generally follows the present deep channel of the Bay. At 
Annapolis the maximum depth of the Pleistocene channel is on the 
order of 200 feet below the present sea level while the mouth of 
the Rappahannock River is 140 feet. 
The present configuration of the Chesapeake represents only 
the latest design of the Bay. During as many as seven other sea 
level excursions during the last million years, other novel con¬ 
figurations of the Chesapeake Bay may have existed. For ex¬ 
ample, some evidence suggests that the Chesapeake used to exit 
from across Delmarva Peninsula in the vicinity of Chincoteague, 
Virginia. 
For our purposes today we're interested in part in people 
interactions with the Chesapeake. Rather than present a demo¬ 
graphic map which shows you where the people live in Chesapeake 
21 
