The Salish Sea got its name in 1988, and most locals still cannot name it
Between Vancouver and Seattle lies a sea about the size of the Gulf of Riga, home shores for 8.76 million people. It only got a collective name in 1988, from a Bellingham geography professor. In a 2019 survey, just 9 percent of Washingtonians and 15 percent of British Columbians could identify it.
The Salish Sea is an umbrella for waters that already had names: Puget Sound, the Strait of Georgia and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, plus a maze of connecting channels, sheltered from the open Pacific by Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula. Bert Webber of Western Washington University meant the term to sit alongside the older names, not erase them, hoping a shared label would make people care more for the whole ecosystem. The name honours the Coast Salish, Indigenous peoples of southwest British Columbia and northwest Washington who used these waterways as trade routes and still draw food from them. Official approval came on 12 November 2009 in the United States and in February 2010 in British Columbia; Canada also recognises the French form, Mer des Salish.
Its shape comes from deep time. The basin sits in the Georgia Depression, formed by colliding plates around 150 million years ago, then gouged by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet during the Vashon Glaciation. When the ice pulled back past the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the sea flooded in. Today it stretches about 440 km, averages 130 m deep and plunges to 670 m in Jervis Inlet. More than 400 islands dot it, the biggest being Whidbey Island in Washington.
Rivers keep the water brackish. The Fraser alone pours in an average 3,475 cubic metres a second, while salt arrives through Juan de Fuca, and the watershed is over six times the sea's surface. That mix feeds kelp forests, eelgrass meadows, 253 fish species and 37 kinds of marine mammal.
The southern resident orcas, which eat fish, are in trouble: by 2019 only 73 remained after low salmon numbers and inbreeding took their toll. Glass sponge reefs, once thought to have died out around the Cretaceous, turned up off the British Columbia coast in 1987 and are now shielded from bottom-contact fishing.
Source: Salish Sea
