The Environmental Protection Agency

The many uses of the edge, where land meets water, draws hatful so powerfully that nearly half the world's population has settled on five percent of its land mass, adjacent to coastlines. In America, almost three-quarters of the population live within 50 mils of an marine or Great Lakes coast, and the alcove with perhaps the great kernel of shoreline edge for its size of anyplace on earth is the Chesapeake. analyse the ratio of the true laurel's shoreline to its length with almost any similar coastal body of water, the Bay's ratio is nearly 35:1, as foreign to the others with a ratio of two to four times their greatest length or width.

The Chesapeake Bay, whose waters atomic number 18 bounded on the north by Maryland and on the south by Virginia, is the largest inlet in the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the east United States. Its historical background has a charm any its own: "Chesapeake Bay, 'Queen of the Estuaries' was formed 10,000 years ago when glaciers melted in the Susquehanna River valley . . . [and] contains roughly 18 trillion gallons of water, teeming with macabre crabs, oysters and finfish. It also serves a s a palatial biddy sanctuary."2 The Bay is 193 miles long and ranges from three to 25 miles wide, and divides a finger of land known as the Delmarva Peninsula. The Bay, whose 12 mile wide mouth is at the southern end, flanked by mantel Charles and Cape Henry, is fed by 23 tributaries. They are a commingle blessing:

"The rivers are not so much the branches as the roots; they match far up into the land for water and nutrients. It is the rivers that made the bespeak so rich, and it is the rivers that are now killing it."3 The easterly shore of the Bay is irregular, marshy, flat and wooded, cut by unfathomable creeks, guts, necks and inlets. The western shore has a straighter shoreline and higher ground with bluffs and cliffs.

To the biologist, the Bay is a world class laboratory; and to the industrialist and the sanitary engineer, it is an sparing source of the dilution for the disposition of pollution.

It is also a federal and multitude bay, a proving ground for big guns at Aberdeen, a bombing, strafing and shelling range for naval jets and destroyers at Bloodsworth Island, and its depths are convenient to the Pentagon for subaquatic demolition experiments, which occasionally have blown up weakfish by the ton, and oysters by the bar. Just as no adept comprehensive federal law addresses groundwater contamination, no single restrictive program controls the wide array of activities at industrial and commercialized sources (although the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 requires federal agencies to take in environmental impacts of their proposed activities and publish their findings) that may cause much(prenominal) contamination.

A basic unit of food production in the bay is phytoplankton, or algae, which are microscopic, floating kit and boodles on which everything else feeds, directly or indirectly. The growth of phytoplankton, in turn, depends on supplies of two vital plant nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, which wash into the estuary (meaning a semi-enclosed coastal body of water, freely connected to the ocean and within which sea water is mixed with and measurably diluted by fresh water from the land) when rain runs off the surrounding land, and from the discharges of sewer treatment plants. When scientists began to measure the inputs of such nutrients, however, the amounts were only a smal
Ordercustompaper.com is a professional essay writing service at which you can buy essays on any topics and disciplines! All custom essays are written by professional writers!