Bohai Bay () is one of the three major

bay 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 (geography), gulf, sea, sound (geography), sound, or bight (geogra ...

s of the Bohai Sea, the northwestern and innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea. It is bounded by the coastlines of eastern Hebei province ( Tangshan and Cangzhou), Tianjin municipality and northern

Shandong province Shandong ( , ; ; alternately romanized as Shantung) is a coastal province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the East China region. Shandong has played a major role in Chinese history since the beginning of Chinese civilizatio ...

( Binzhou and Dongying) south of the Daqing River estuary (which is an old

mouth In animal anatomy, the mouth, also known as the oral cavity, or in Latin cavum oris, is the opening through which many animals take in food and issue vocal sounds. It is also the cavity lying at the upper end of the alimentary canal, bounded on ...

of Luan River in Laoting County) and north of the Yellow River estuary. It is the most southerly water in the

northern hemisphere The Northern Hemisphere is the half of Earth that is north of the Equator. For other planets in the Solar System, north is defined as being in the same celestial hemisphere relative to the invariable plane of the solar system as Earth's Nort ...

where

sea ice Sea ice arises as seawater freezes. Because ice is less dense than water, it floats on the ocean's surface (as does fresh water ice, which has an even lower density). Sea ice covers about 7% of the Earth's surface and about 12% of the world's oce ...

can form. The Bohai Bay is the drainage destination of the Hai River and 15 other rivers. Due to these rivers' muddy runoff, the bay used to be a highly silty water body, but extensive damming of the various river systems has greatly diminished siltage. Nevertheless, the Bohai Bay in effect concentrates the runoff of the whole eastern

North China Plain The North China Plain or Huang-Huai-Hai Plain () is a large-scale downfaulted rift basin formed in the late Paleogene and Neogene and then modified by the deposits of the Yellow River. It is the largest alluvial plain of China. The plain is bord ...

, and the Bay is an intensely polluted body of water. Reduced silt deposition and sea level rise are causing problems with sea encroachment in some coastal areas. Fisheries were traditionally some of the richest in China, fed by enormous sediment runoff and extensive shallows to serve as hatcheries. Pollution, eutrophication, habitat destruction caused by land reclamation, and intense

overfishing Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish (i.e. fishing) from a body of water at a rate greater than that the species can replenish its population naturally (i.e. the overexploitation of the fishery's existing fish stock), resulting in th ...

have resulted in a collapse of stocks, and a decline of trawl catch per unit of effort (CPUE) from 138.8 kg/net.hr to 11.2 kg/net.hr from 1959 to 1998. The Bohai Bay is ringed by several major ports: the Port of Tianjin, the large Port of Tangshan itself which consists of three ports ( Caofeidian, Jingtang and Fennan), and the Port of Huanghua, making the Bay into a very crowded waterway. Land reclamation in Tianjin and in Caofeidian have greatly changed the littoral zone, and destroyed much of the area's

wetlands A wetland is a distinct ecosystem that is flooded or saturated by water, either permanently (for years or decades) or seasonally (for weeks or months). Flooding results in oxygen-free (anoxic) processes prevailing, especially in the soils. The ...

. Land reclamation has also affected migratory birds. As is the case of most of the Bohai Sea, the Bohai Bay is rich in hydrocarbon deposits and has several active offshore

oil field A petroleum reservoir or oil and gas reservoir is a subsurface accumulation of hydrocarbons contained in porous or fractured rock formations. Such reservoirs form when kerogen (ancient plant matter) is created in surrounding rock by the presence ...

s. Jidong Nanpu contains , while the bay as a whole is estimated to contain . On June 4, 2011, a large oil spill occurred related to the

China National Offshore Oil Corporation China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or CNOOC Group (Chinese: 中国海洋石油总公司 Pinyin: ''Zhōngguó Háiyáng Shíyóu Zǒnggōngsī''), is one of the largest national oil companies in China, and the third-largest national oil c ...

References

See also