Voyage of Discovery: Puget Sound, Two Centuries Later
In the spring of 1792, Captain George Vancouver and some 145 sea-weary crew members in two ships sailed around Cape Flattery and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, searching for the “expansive Mediterranean ocean” rumored to exist in this largely uncharted corner of the Pacific.
As they entered Puget Sound and surveyed the landscape, the stern and often crotchety Englishman sang its praises. “The surface of the sea was perfectly smooth,” he wrote in his journal. :”And the country before us exhibited everything that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view.”
There was little time for poetry, however. Over the next six weeks, Vancouver and company sailed and rowed through much of this int4ricate inland sea, meticulously charting its length and breadth and depth, assigning names to its islands, channels and bays, and ultimately compiling the first map of Puget Sound. It was a remarkable achievement. Published in 1799, Vancouver’s charts of the Northwest coast quickly circulated throughout Europe, luring more sthips to this newly discovered land.
Two centuries later, Puget Sound is home to 4 million people in a dozen cities from Bellingham to Olympia and Bremerton. Its waters are spanned by bridges, cables and super ferries.. Yet the map Vancouver started inking remains very much a work in progress. Much of the thousand miles of shoreline he sketched from his vessel, Discovery, has been reshaped or obliterated by everything from timbered bulkheads to world-class seaports. And only recently have scientists devised ways to peer beneath the surface, adding a third, all-important dimension to this map.
Earlier this month, the University of Washington research ship Thompson set out on much the same voyage – from Admiralty Inlet, down Hood Canal and back out into the southern fjords, then north into the San Juans. For five days, some 20 oceanographers and students worked around the clock, probing the sound, carefully drawing water samples from its depths and rushing them into the on-board laboratory.
It was, said oceanographer Mark Warner, the first time in 40 years that scientists have attempted a comprehensive assessment of Puget Sound in a single voyage. Their objective: To gather data on currents, water quality, temperatures and productivity at some 30 specific stations – data demanded by a powerful new UW computer program called the Puget Sound Regional Synthesis Model, or PRISM.
UW researcher Jeff Richey, who heads the PRISM project, and his colleagues are today’s Vancouver’s, pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and compiling it into a dynamic, “virtual Puget Sound” available to researchers, teachers, planners and policy-makers.
The oceanographers are not the only ones retracing Vancouver’s 200-year-old course. Today, The Seattle Times begins its own exploration of Puget Sound. We are a crew of two or three – this reporter and UW historian of science Keith Benson, joined from time to time by photographer Tom Reese – aboard Benson’s 32-foot sailboat, “Velella.”
Over the month to come, we will retrace the voyage of the Discovery, and of the Thompson. Our mission is to re-explore a place that is both familiar and foreign. What Vancouver saw freshly, we will see through the eyes of scientists gradually learning some of Puget Sound’s secrets. Unlike our predecessor, we will not have to wait seven years to share our findings. With a laptop computer linked to a cellular phone, we will be able to bring readers with us, reporting what we learn as we learn it.
First, a few basics: Puget Sound is an inland sea or estuary, of about 2,000 square miles, containing about 1 trillion cubic meters of water, give or take a few billion. It is an extremely complex body of water, due to factors such as its extreme depth (an average of 600 feet), its intricate shoreline, its fierce tides and currents, and its maze of fjord-like channels. It is both one ecosystem and a collection of ecosystems that may or may not be linked. The water itself is complicates – layers of salt water imported from the North Pacific and huge volumes of fresh water delivered by rivers such as the Nisqually, Skagit and Dosewallips.
For these and other reasons, Puget Sound is also one of the world’s most productive inland seas. Its cloudy waters are an indication not of sickness, but of dense concentrations of marine life ranging from microscopic plants to orca whales.
Yet, the Sound is also a troubled sea. Once-healthy populations of salmon, herring, rockfish and other species have dwindled. Something out there is not working right. Fifteen years ago, the region launched a concerted effort to preserve Puget Sound. Billions of dollars have been spent building sewage-treatment plants and addressing polluted bays. New laws have made it more difficult to build on the waterfront. Commercial and sports fishing have been cut back dramatically.
There has been some payoff. Earlier this year, the state Puget Sound Water Quality Action Team reported that water quality has improved in most places. Previously closed shellfish beds have been reopened. But nobody believes the sound is fixed. The federal government recently warned that it intends to formally list Puget Sound Chinook salmon runs as endangered, potentially invoking restrictions on cities, businesses and homeowners from the shores of the Sound to the crest of the Cascades.
And most people seem amazingly willing to swallow their medicine. Surveyed last month by pollster Stuart Elway, 74 percent of Puget Sound voters contacted said they were aware of the salmon problem. Four out of five agreed that salmon are an indicator of environmental health and that government should do what is necessary to save them – whatever ithe costs.
So what now? Polls suggest that people blame some combination of pollution, sprawl, over-fishing, poor management, logging, dams, agriculture and El Nino. The rogue’s gallery of culprits may suggest confusion, but it also reflects reality. If science can provide any answers, we certainly are in the right place. Puget Sound is home to thousands of marine biologists and oceanographers working for dozens of institutions. Yet most scientists are deeply reluctant to assign blame or to prescribe solutions for the state of our waters. There are too many uncertainties. For all our efforts to understand, the sound remains an enormous black box. On one hand, its waters are transparent; yet they are also dark, apaque and seemingly impenetrable. Ten feet beneath the surface, light begins to dim; at 100 feet, it is virtually gone.
Still, confronted by declining salmon runs, taxpayers long for simple diagnoses and simple solutions. Ban gill nets. Shoot sea lions. Tear down dams. End logging. Trouble is, instant analysis doesn’t work out there. The one thing we know about marine biology is that it is profoundly different from the biology in our back yard. Take reproduction: Most fish produce thousands, even millions of eggs and larvae during their lives. Those offspring are immediately left to fend for themselves, drifting in a fluid environment where most are eaten by larger fish – possibly Mom or Dad. Nature’s strategy is a massive smorgasbord that allows only one in a thousand to reach maturity and perpetuate the lineage.
Scientists believe that a minute change in the environment – water temperature, currents or an upwelling of microscopic plankton thousands of miles away – can profoundly affect which creatures survive and which don’t Unraveling that web is a daunting challenge. Consider, for example, the perspectives of just two of the oceanographers who worked aboard the Thompson this month. Jan Newton, who works for the state Department of Ecology, studies diatoms –microscopic, single-celled plants that drift beneath the surface of the sea. To her, water samples crqwn from the depths of the Sound are pure gold, a micro-world that supports all other life in the sea. The rate at which diatoms provides critical clues to the health of the sound, she says.
UW oceanographer Mitsuhiro Kawase sees the same ecosystem very differently. His view is global. As a computer modeler at Princeton, he studied oceans for 15 years without ever going to sea. At the UW, his focus has narrowed to Puget Sound as a marine system composed of tides and currents, deep water and shallow water, layers of salt water and fresh, seasonal fluctuations and more. Kawase studies the sound as displayed on a computer monitor. The same spaceshiplike gadget that collects Jan Newton’s water samples carries an array of instruments that measure water temperature, salinity and oxygen content at different depths and transmit that data directly into the computer.
“The data provides an opportunity to test the model,” he says. “So far, it has done a pretty god job of predictions circulation, layering fresh water and salt water. But it is not perfect. We haven’t been able to factor for wind.” He steps across the room and calls up PRISM, clicking his mouse to take a simulated flight over a simulated sea, clicking again for an animated display of undulating arrows that show tide cycles in Admiralty Inlet or Tacoma Narrows. “It’s working pretty well so far,” he says. “Our main limitation is memory.”
To most Sound dwellers, Puget Sound conjures up images of leaping salmon and killer whales. But these are only the marquee players in a vast cast that also includes untold trillions of microscopic plankton, millions of herring and unknown numbers of 10-foot, bottom-dwelling sharks we rarely, if ever, see. As the Elway poll shows, the collective will already exists to preserve our regional sea. But effective strategies must be based on the best science, the broadest data available. We need wisdom, but first we need more memory.
This is our modest mission – to add a little more data to the collective memory. Before leaving the dock in Seattle, we equipped the good ship Velella with an odd cargo -- journals from Vancouver’s voyage, cardboard boxes jammed with inter view3 notes and biological studies of Puget Sound We have a laptop computer linked via cellphone to The Times newsroom. We have lightweight kayaks on deck, a hand-held GPS device and, for diving, a drysuit, mask and snorkel.
Over the next few weeks, we will sail to Discovery Bay, where Vancouver began his exploration, then down the Kitsap Peninsula and to the soughern inlets, back north along the urbanized shores of Taoma and Seattle and finally into the San Juans. Along the way we will visit with scientists and others who endeavor to peer beneath the surface. We will visit the notorious toxic hot spots and a couple of environmental success stories, and try to explore some puzzling questions: What in the world are diatoms and why should we care? Why are salmon and other fin fish declining while oysters and crab and other shellfish seem to be doing very well, thank you? Why are harbor seal populations growing while their food supply dwindles? Are expensive sewage-treatment plants worth the expense?
We have an itinerary, but no agenda. We sail with no intention of making rand discoveries or scientific breakthroughs. We have no interest in pointing fingers, nor in preaching ecological virtue. Instead our job is to take a fresh look at this grand inland sea through the eyes of both Vancouver, who explored these waters when they were supposedly undisturbed, and through the eyes of today’s scientists, Vancouver’s intellectual descendants, who are still trying to finish his map.
