What types of pollution affects the Chesapeake Bay?

What types of pollution affects the Chesapeake Bay?

As forests and wetlands have been replaced by farms, cities, and suburbs to accommodate a growing population, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution to the Chesapeake Bay has greatly increased. Poor water quality has negatively affected important species such as submerged bay grasses, blue crab, oysters, and fish species.

What are the major sources of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay?

The largest source of pollution to the Bay comes from agricultural runoff, which contributes roughly 40 percent of the nitrogen and 50 percent of the phosphorus entering the Chesapeake Bay.

What is polluting the Chesapeake Bay?

There are three major contributors to the poor health of our streams, rivers, and the Chesapeake Bay—nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment. High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus fuel unnaturally high levels of algae growth in the water, blocking sunlight from reaching underwater grasses that serve as food and habitat.

What is the biggest environmental threat to the Chesapeake Bay?

Unfortunately, the Chesapeake Bay faces serious problems due to human activities, including polluted stormwater runoff, over-fertilization and pollution from animal wastes, deforestation, wetland destruction from agricultural, urban, and suburban development, and sea level rise caused by global climate change.

What are the 3 types of pollution?

The three major types of pollution are air pollution, water pollution, and land pollution. Sometimes, air pollution is visible. A person can see dark smoke pour from the exhaust pipes of large trucks or factories, for example. More often, however, air pollution is invisible.

What are the 4 main pollution types?

The major kinds of pollution, usually classified by environment, are air pollution, water pollution, and land pollution. Modern society is also concerned about specific types of pollutants, such as noise pollution, light pollution, and plastic pollution.

How does pollution affect Chesapeake Bay?

Airborne nitrogen is one of the largest sources of pollution affecting the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Excess nitrogen can fuel the growth of algae blooms, which can block sunlight from reaching underwater grasses and create low-oxygen “dead zones” that suffocate marine life.

What is happening to the Chespeake Bay?

Average sea levels in the Chesapeake Bay have been rising. Many places along the bay have seen a one-foot increase in relative sea level rise over the 20th century, six inches due to climate change and another six inches due to naturally subsiding coastal lands-a factor that places the Chesapeake Bay region at particular risk.

What is Chesapeake watershed?

The Chesapeake Bay Watershed . A watershed is all of the land whose water and rainfall will eventually drain into a particular river, lake, bay, or other body of water. The Chesapeake Bay watershed is 64,000 square miles and has 11,600 miles of tidal shoreline, including tidal wetlands and islands.