Table of Contents
About Puget Sound
Puget Sound is a large inland estuary connected to the Pacific Ocean. It is about 95 miles long and 1 to 5 miles wide with it’s northern boundary at Admiralty Inlet and ending in the south at the city of Olympia.
The shoreline is 1330 miles long, of that some 30% is armored with bulkheads. The average depth is around 450 feet with a maximum depth of around 930 ft. It is subdivided into three deep basins connected by shallow sills, Whidbey Basin (mean depth-206’), South Sound (mean depth-121’) and the Main Basin (mean depth-323’). An associated body of water located to the west of Puget Sound is Hood Canal which is about 50 miles long and 1 mile wide. The average depth of Hood Canal is 177 ft. with a maximum of 600 ft. in Dabob Bay. Puget Sound connects with the Pacific Ocean through the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the west and Georgia Strait to the north.
Photo of Olympia, WA Courtesy of the Washington State Archives
Salish Sea Map by Stefan Freelan This photo has been altered. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/
Puget Sound and the associated low lands found their origin in the advance of western lobes of a continental glacier which ended around ten thousand years ago.
Around it’s shores live some 4 million people with the largest cities being Seattle, Tacoma, Everett, Olympia and Bremerton. This is a major cause of the increase in pollution in Puget Sound.
Formation of Puget Sound
The geological history of Puget Sound is quite complex. The following description of that history is paraphrased from a 2008 technical report to the Puget Sound Nearshore Partnership by Hugh Shipman of the Department of Ecology. The report is entitled “A Geomorphic Classification of Puget Sound Nearshore Landforms”. Please consult the original report for more details.
The Puget Lowland, in which Puget Sound lies, is the result of tectonic processes related to the subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate beneath the western edge of North America. These processes have established the broad-scale topography and geology of the region. Superimposed on the underlying geology is the earth shaping action of the Vashon glaciation (15,000-20,000 BP). Ice sheets advanced across Puget Sound, depositing large volumes of glacial sediment. This left a distinct north–south grain to the region’s hills and valleys, which are generally superimposed on a broad outwash plain about 330 feet in elevation.
Meltwater flowing southward beneath the ice is believed to have scoured the major troughs that define Puget Sound today. Most of the sediment exposed on the edges of river valleys and along the coastal bluffs is glacially derived. The resulting landscape was modified during the last 10,000 years, after the ice sheets melted, by water erosion of hillsides and subsequent deposition. The major rivers, which flow from the Cascades and Olympics, carried sediment into their lower reaches, building alluvial valleys and deltas. In addition the growth of many of these large river deltas has been influenced by eruptions and mudflows associated with the Cascade volcanoes. Also streams drain hundreds of small watersheds located entirely within the Lowland and often within a few miles of the coastline; they cut into the erodible glacial sediments, forming small valleys and ravines, and redeposit material in narrow floodplains and at the marine shoreline.
Finally the shoreline has also been altered due to changes in sea level. These changes are caused by several processes including global sea level changes, rebound of the land as the ice sheets melted and local tectonics. Specifically, in the last 5,000 years, sea level has remained relatively constant in northern Puget Sound, whereas in southern Puget Sound, submergence has occurred.
The behavior of the Puget Lobe of the Vashon glacier is shown in the diagram pictures to the right.
Puget Lobe – Author Unknown
Marine Pollution
Pollution in our local lakes, streams, rivers and Puget Sound affects everyone. All water runs downhill through the watershed as surface water or ground water to Puget Sound. So anything in that water can reach and effect Puget Sound.
Pollution harms fish, shellfish and other forms of life, either killing them directly, poisoning their food or, for some species of recreational or commercial importance, making them unfit to eat. Pollution of our marine waters impacts shellfish aquaculture (with a value of around $75,000,000) as well as recreational and commercial fisheries with a value of many millions of dollars.
Pollution can come from untreated or poorly treated human waste, such as leaking and broken septic systems and inadequate waste water treatment plants. Untreated agriculture and pet waste are another major problem. Stormwater runoff from our streets, roofs and lawns also adds both organic material to the water as well as chemicals such as copper from automobile brakes, nitrogen and phosphorus from lawn fertilizer and oil from leaking trucks and cars. Catastrophic loss of oil and gas from vessels, cars and trucks can be especially damaging to both marine and freshwater ecosystems.
As the human and animal population has grown around Puget Sound since the early 19th century, methods of waste disposal have strained to keep up. We must continue to improve and expand our waste water and storm water treatment systems to reduce the levels of bacteria and viruses and harmful chemicals produced by our high standard of living reaching our local streams, rivers and Puget Sound.
Saving Endangered Species Art Contest Submission, Mclane Elementary School Students
Listen to the thoughts and ideas from students at McKenney Elementary School
in Olympia, Washington about local pollution issues.
History of Pacific Coast Marine Ecology
What do the famous writers John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell and the first ecological evaluation of marine habitats have in common? Why Ed Ricketts of course! Who is Ed Ricketts you ask? Well step back in time to the 1930’s. In a crammed marine biological laboratory next to the sardine canneries in the small town of Monterey, California, Steinbeck and Campbell sat many an evening with Ricketts sharing stories, philosophical ramblings and life lessons as their young lives intertwined. Ricketts was a marine biologist, educated at the University of Chicago, who moved west to seek his fortune in the tidepools of the Pacific Ocean. He collected biological specimens for a living, but his passion was seeking the truth about life. From these conversations and joint field trips came the intellectual fire that sent Steinbeck to writing “Grapes of Wrath”, “Tortilla flats”, “Cannery Row” (in which Doc is a fictional Ricketts) and others; Campbell to pin “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (which started the field of comparative mythology) and “The Masks of God”; and Ricketts to produce the first habitat-oriented marine biology guide book “Between Pacific Tides”.
“Between Pacific Tides” arose from Ricketts’ observations of the distribution and interaction of marine animals and plants in the intertidal zone where he collected organisms for sale to schools and other laboratories. Inspired by ecological concepts learned at the University of Chicago, Ricketts saw in the tidepools of the Monterey Peninsula a microcosm of the world. He spent the rest of his life visiting and cataloguing intertidal and shallow subtidal organisms from the Baja Peninsula of Mexico to Juneau, Alaska. This included a major expedition to the Sea of Cortez with Steinbeck where many animals were discovered and many ideas were discussed. You can read about the trip in a book by Steinbeck (based on Ricketts’ diary) called “The Log from the Sea of Cortez”.
What is significant about “Between Pacific Tides” is that it is not just a book on identification of marine organisms, although it does that, rather it is a treatise on what organisms live where and why. For the first time the habitats within a beach are discussed and explained based on ecological factors such as tides, exposure to waves and currents and type of sediments. As a result we can understand why a mud flat has a different community of animals than a sand flat and why animals are different at the high tide line than at the low tide line. Knowledge of the different marine and estuarine habitats, their geological and biological characteristics and associated organisms is the educational foundation for any aspiring marine scientist. It also provides an organizational framework for understanding the distribution and abundance of organisms. This framework allows the casual observer to keep track of what species should be where and helps the marine scientist to understand human impacts on marine communities such as habitat alteration or pollution.
First published in 1939, “Between Pacific Tides” has been maintained and updated by several notable marine ecologists including Joel Hedgpeth and most recently David Phillips in 1985. The tradition has been carried on by Eugene Kozloff in a major publication called “Seashore Life of the Northern Pacific Coast” whose most recent edition was in 1993. Similar, less extensive, books are by Gloria Snively, “Exploring the Seashore in British Columbia, Washington and Oregon”, updated in 2003 and Lynwood S. Smith, “Living Shores of the Pacific Northwest”, 1976.
For those of you just wanting to learn the name of a crab, worm, seaweed or snail you saw at a local beach or while diving there are a number of identification books for the lay person. Examples are “Whelks to Whales, Coastal Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest” by Rick M. Harbo, 1999, “The Beachcomber’s Guide to Seashore Life in the Pacific Northwest” by J. Duane Sept, 1999 and “Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest” by Andy Lamb and Bernard Hanby, 2005.