Geography

THE HUDSON-RARITAN ESTUARY

The Hudson-Raritan Estuary and watershed is a damaged but recovering ecosystem - a home to 15 million people and a rich diversity of wildlife. From space, the Estuary appears to jab like a blue arrowhead deep into the Northeast coast - a 20-mile indent with 650 miles of shore divided between urban New Jersey and New York City. The Estuary - where freshwater streams mix with salty tides - is a rich and diverse ecosystem of bays, straits, islands, rivers, salt and freshwater wetlands, mudflats, and beaches. Its dredged channels, natural harbors and port facilities also offer shelter to the world's busiest commercial port complex.

The Estuary's main geographic features (swinging clockwise from its southern cusp) are:

• Raritan Bay Complex (fed by Raritan River and includes Sandy Hook Bay).
• Newark Bay Complex (fed by Passaic and Hackensack rivers, and drains into Arthur Kill and Kill Van Kull tidal straits).
• Upper/Lower New York Bay Complex (fed by Hudson and East rivers).
• Jamaica Bay on the western tip of Long Island.