Qualla: Salish Sea

Salish Sea: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darren Kirby from Penticton, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. The sea got its name in 1988, and it was one man's idea. Bert Webber, a geography professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, was looking for a way to talk about a single body of water that maps had always carved into three: the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound. His proposal was not to replace those names but to add one above them, because the water does not recognise the boundary between them and neither does anything living in it. Call the whole thing the Salish Sea, he argued, and people might start caring for it as one place. It took two decades, but the name stuck: the United States Board on Geographic Names approved it on 12 November 2009, and British Columbia followed in February 2010.

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Image: Darren Kirby from Penticton, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Salish Sea: Whose Name It Is

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pierre Markuse from Hamm, Germany, CC BY 2.0. The name honours the Coast Salish peoples, who have lived along these shores for thousands of years and for whom these waterways were trade routes, travel corridors and a source of food they still depend on. There is an honest complication in it, though, which the record does not...

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Image: Pierre Markuse from Hamm, Germany | CC BY 2.0

Salish Sea: The Shape of the Water

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masterhatch, CC BY-SA 4.0. Measured end to end, from the channels of the Discovery Islands in the north to the head of Budd Inlet at the far south of Puget Sound, the Salish Sea runs about 440 kilometres. Its surface covers roughly 18,000 square kilometres - about the size of the Gulf of Riga. It averages ...

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Image: Masterhatch | CC BY-SA 4.0

Salish Sea: Carved and Drowned

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gene Daniels, Public domain. The basin itself is old. The Georgia Depression formed out of a collision of continental plates roughly 150 million years ago, a long trough running parallel to the coast. What made it a sea was much more recent. During the Vashon Glaciation, between about 19,000 and 16,000 years...

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Image: Gene Daniels | Public domain

Salish Sea: Reefs That Should Not Exist

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit marneejill from Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1987, surveyors working off the British Columbia coast found something that the textbooks said had been gone since the age of the dinosaurs: living glass sponge reefs. Sponges with skeletons of silica had built reef structures in shallow seas in the Mesozoic, and the assumptio...

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Image: marneejill from Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Salish Sea: Kelp, Whales and 8.76 Million People

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darren Kirby from Penticton, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. Bull kelp and giant kelp form forests over the rocky bottom; eelgrass meadows carpet the shallows. Thirty-seven marine mammal species live here, among them Steller sea lions, humpback whales and killer whales, and the fortunes of the two orca populations have diverged sharply. Ma...

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Image: Darren Kirby from Penticton, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0