Name______
Watersheds Study Guide Answer Key2015
1. Be prepared to define the term watershed. It is an area of land where water drains into a common body of water such as a pond, stream, river or lake.
2. What is turbidity, and why is it important? Turbidity is the amount of sediment, or dirt, in the water. High turbidity blocks sunlight, so it makes it tough on plants, and it’s hard for many fish to live there.
3. Given a map of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, be prepared to identify Maryland, Virginia, the Delmarva Peninsula, West Virginia, Harpers Ferry, the Shenandoah, Washington, D.C. SRMS, and Norfolk, VA, plus the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the York, and the James Rivers, plus the Chesapeake Bay from end to end, plus the Atlantic Ocean.. See your map
4. Given a map of the major watersheds of Virginia, be prepared explain where the Eastern Continental Divide is, and what that term means. Find the New Watershed, and its eastern boundary is also a portion of the Eastern Continental Divide.
5. Given a piece of aluminum foil, be prepared to shape it in the form of the United States (Florida will be important to show) with the appropriate continental divides in place to actually function as they do in real life. Be sure to show the Rocky Mountains in the West. In the East, the divide never reaches Florida, but flattens out before reaching Florida.
6. Be prepared to explain the meaning of the term estuary, including a description of flows of water and examples of the two major estuaries in the U. S. An estuary is a body of water where fresh water from rivers and streams mixes with salty water from the ocean. The two major estuaries in the U.S. are the Chesapeake Bay, and Puget Sound in Washington State.
7. Be prepared to explain the meaning of the term dead zone or eutrophication as applied to bodies of water, and how too much fertilizer runoff water can result in dead zones. A dead zone is where the body of water will not support life. The water has eutrophied, or is a dead zone. It can happen from pollution, such as an oil spill, or from too much fertilizer. Fertilizer runoff leads to runaway algae growth, called an algae bloom. Then the algae die off at the same time, and the decaying stuff sucks up the dissolved oxygen, so nothing can live there. Bad stuff.
8. Be prepared to (a) define the following terms: biotic and abiotic. Biotic = living factors, such as plants and fish. Abiotic are the nonliving factors, such as salinity (salt content), pH, other chemicals in the water, and the temperature of the water.
(c) Explain what dissolved oxygen in water is, to include a drawing below of dissolved oxygen, water, and a fish. Dissolved oxygen is where Oxygen molecules in gas form dissolve in water, or fit between H2O molecules.
H2O H2O H2O
O2
H2O H2O H2O H2O H2O H2O O2
(d) Explain the relationship between water temperature and dissolved oxygen. The hotter the water is, the less dissolved oxygen that the water can hold.
9. Beginning 35 million years ago describe the many events resulting in the modern-day Chesapeake Bay. It all began 35 million years ago, when an asteroid came hurtling towards Earth. It exploded in the air, making it a bolide, directly over an area where we now have the end of the Bay near the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. Water levels were higher then, so the whole place was covered by water, but even so a deep crater was created. Fast forward to about 12000 years ago, and some major ice ages. So much H2O was locked up as ice on the continents, especially Europe, that the ocean levels were way lower. Meaning that there was a land bridge from Asia to North America, AND that the entire area where the Chesapeake Bay now is found was dry, dry, dry. And the continental shelf was dry too. What this meant was that when the glaciers started to melt, they caused major erosion, like a long, long canyon from where the Bay now starts to the crater at the end. Later, as ocean levels rose, they filled in that canyon. Voila, that is the story of how the Bay was formed.