A bay is a recessed, coastal body of water that directly connects to a larger main body of water, such as an ocean , a lake , or another bay. A large bay is usually called a gulf , sea , sound , or bight . A cove is a small, circular bay with a narrow entrance. A fjord is an elongated bay formed by glacial action. The term embayment is also used for related features , such as extinct bays or freshwater environments.
24-565: Raritan Bay is a bay located at the southern portion of Lower New York Bay between the U.S. states of New York and New Jersey and is part of the New York Bight . The bay is bounded on the northwest by New York's Staten Island , on the west by Perth Amboy, New Jersey , on the south by the Raritan Bayshore communities in the New Jersey counties of Middlesex and Monmouth , and on
48-545: A bight . There are various ways in which bays can form. The largest bays have developed through plate tectonics . As the super-continent Pangaea broke up along curved and indented fault lines, the continents moved apart and left large bays; these include the Gulf of Guinea , the Gulf of Mexico , and the Bay of Bengal , which is the world's largest bay. Bays also form through coastal erosion by rivers and glaciers . A bay formed by
72-496: A broad, flat fronting terrace". Bays were significant in the history of human settlement because they provided easy access to marine resources like fisheries . Later they were important in the development of sea trade as the safe anchorage they provide encouraged their selection as ports . The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines a bay as a well-marked indentation in
96-493: A glacier is a fjord . Rias are created by rivers and are characterised by more gradual slopes. Deposits of softer rocks erode more rapidly, forming bays, while harder rocks erode less quickly, leaving headlands . Keasbey, New Jersey Keasbey (pronounced "KAYS-bee" ) is a census-designated place (CDP) and unincorporated community in Woodbridge Township , Middlesex County, New Jersey , United States. It
120-402: A landscape dominated by spruce and pine forests. These forests gradually gave way to the modern deciduous forest in the region by mid- Holocene time. Lagoons and bays in the area around Sandy Hook hosted oysters, hard and soft shell clams, lobsters, blue crabs, and a variety of other invertebrates common in bays in the region today. South of western Long Island, tidal flats and wetlands occupied
144-623: A museum. One of the brick manufacturers established in Keasbey was owned by the Keasbey family. Keasbey is in northeastern Middlesex County, occupying the southern end of Woodbridge Township. It is bordered to the north by Fords within Woodbridge Township; to the east by the city of Perth Amboy ; to the west by Edison Township ; and to the south by the Raritan River , across which is the borough of Sayreville . The Garden State Parkway and
168-558: A testament of the utilization of the bay for food by Algonquin Indian tribes (Lenapes) who occupied the area when early Colonialists arrived. Early settlers used these shell piles for road construction and field fertilizer. Tottenville was once well known for its roads paved with oyster shells. The Raritan River was perhaps the major drainage channel along the ice front throughout the Wisconsin glaciation (Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4). Prior to that time
192-413: Is an arm of Hudson Bay in northeastern Canada . Some large bays, such as the Bay of Bengal and Hudson Bay, have varied marine geology . The land surrounding a bay often reduces the strength of winds and blocks waves . Bays may have as wide a variety of shoreline characteristics as other shorelines. In some cases, bays have beaches , which "are usually characterized by a steep upper foreshore with
216-511: Is located in the western outskirts of adjacent Perth Amboy . As of the 2020 census , the CDP's population was 3,027. Many Hispanic / Latino families have relocated from Perth Amboy to Keasbey. Keasbey was originally known as "Florida Grove" due to its picnic areas and beaches on the Raritan River . The community is named after the Keasbey family, whose home in Morristown is now Macculloch Hall,
240-717: The Route 440 freeway intersect in Keasbey. Newark is 19 miles (31 km) to the northeast, New Brunswick , the Middlesex county seat , is 9 miles (14 km) to the southwest, and Staten Island , New York, is 4 miles (6 km) to the east across the Arthur Kill . According to the U.S. Census Bureau , the Keasbey CDP has an area of 1.80 square miles (4.66 km ), of which 1.46 square miles (3.78 km ) are land and 0.34 square miles (0.88 km ), or 18.80%, are water, consisting of
264-679: The Wisconsin glacier, the Raritan River carved back into its headlands and captured the major drainages from the Newark Basin . As the Wisconsin glaciers melted, the Flandrian Transgression eventually flooded the deeper valleys of the Hudson , Raritan, and Arthur Kill. During warming at the end of the Pleistocene and Early Holocene , the area encompassing Raritan Bay changed from tundra to
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#1732844922815288-644: The blue crab , fiddler crab , green crab , horseshoe crab and spider crab . Clams and mussels also live in Raritan Bay. The bay is a popular destination for recreational fishing due to its proximity to the densely populated areas of Central Jersey and New York City . Bay A bay can be the estuary of a river, such as the Chesapeake Bay , an estuary of the Susquehanna River . Bays may also be nested within each other; for example, James Bay
312-499: The bay. For most of the 20th century, the shores of Arthur Kill have been home to the largest petroleum importing, refining, and storage facilities on Earth; as a consequence the estuary has been host to major and minor oil spills. In addition, Arthur Kill drains the area encompassing the second largest landfill on Earth ( Fresh Kills Landfill ). This landfill, and others along the Raritan River, provide an ample supply of leachate to
336-490: The bay. The peak of the fishing industry occurred in the late 1880s to 1910s. Fishing and farming slowly gave way to industries including ship building, ceramics, chemicals and paint manufacturing, electrolytic copper refining, and petroleum refining. In the Keasbey, New Jersey area, large pits were dug to extract the clays for ceramics and bricks, and huge chemical dumps, fly ash piles, and landfills were created to accommodate
360-496: The coast since colonial times. The bay supported a lucrative fishing and shellfish industry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially oysters , which helped to support a stable population around the bay and aided, in part, to feed the flood of immigration. Stable communities continued to grow and change with new industries supporting a larger population base. Advances in methods of fishing and shellfish collecting resulted in overextraction of these resources from
384-459: The coastal regions were resettled by peoples accustomed to village-style living ("tidewater communities") that subsisted on hunting and gathering marine shellfish, and eventually, on agriculture. In pre-Columbian times "woodlands cultures" probably centered in the Ohio Valley became the dominant cultural influence in the region. Large shell middens were found around Raritan Bay and on Staten Island,
408-408: The coastline, whose penetration is in such proportion to the width of its mouth as to contain land-locked waters and constitute more than a mere curvature of the coast. An indentation, however, shall not be regarded as a bay unless its area is as large as (or larger than) that of the semi-circle whose diameter is a line drawn across the mouth of that indentation — otherwise it would be referred to as
432-555: The east by Sandy Hook Bay . The bay is named after the Raritans , a branch of the Lenape tribe who lived in the vicinity of the bay and its river for thousands of years, prior to the arrival of Dutch and English colonists in the 17th century. Archeological evidence suggests that humans were already in the region at the close of the Pleistocene . The early "Big Game Hunters" vanished, but
456-502: The fish catch and prompted government recommendations against its routine consumption. The bay is crossed by a dredged channel allowing commercial ships to enter the Arthur Kill. Raritan Bay's fish include striped bass , fluke , winter flounder , bluefish , porgy , black sea bass , smoothhound shark , northern puffer , northern king fish , oyster toadfish , tautog and weakfish . The crustacean species represented include
480-401: The margins of a tidal estuary (now submerged by marine waters). Inner Raritan Bay began to fill about 2,500 years ago with large oyster beds forming along the estuarine tributaries. Sea level continued to rise about one foot per century. This rise in sea level has resulted in the landward migration of the shoreline (aided by storm-induced coastal erosion ) as much as two miles in some portions of
504-603: The region drained southward across the saddle between the Atlantic Highlands and the Newark Basin into the Delaware River Valley. This saddle area is a very broad flood plain that preserves river terrace gravels ( Pensauken Formation ) from the Sangemon Interglacial State (Stage 5), as well as older Pleistocene fluvial deposits ( Bridgetown Formation ). During the lowstand in sea level caused by
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#1732844922815528-503: The waste from the growing industrial empire. The building of shore management structures (dikes, groins, seawalls), the spraying of DDT (and other pesticides ) to control the mosquito problem, the carving of ditches to drain wetlands, the filling of shore lowlands, the channelization of creeks, highway and sewer construction, neighborhood development, and a myriad point and non-point sources of household, automobile, industrial chemicals, and ocean dumping all contributed to growing toxicity of
552-439: The waterways. Chemical wastes cause stress and disruption of the life cycles of plankton, shellfish and other invertebrates, and the fish, birds, and other wildlife that they support. The result was an ecological disaster. The bay approached sterile conditions at the peak of pollution and algal bloom-induced anoxia. Environmental actions from the 1970s to present have helped slowly bring back sea life, but current conditions pale to
576-508: The wealth of marine resources of the past; certain species of fish and birds continue to decline, and the introduction of tenacious exotic species from around the world contribute to their decline. As a sign of optimism though, oysters are beginning to naturally reappear in the Hudson River after having vanished completely about the time of World War II . Regional industrial overdevelopment and other pollution factors have raised PCB levels in
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