Juan de Fuca Channel is a submarine channel off the shore of

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

state, United States and the

Strait of Juan de Fuca The Strait of Juan de Fuca (officially named Juan de Fuca Strait in Canada) is a body of water about long that is the Salish Sea's outlet to the Pacific Ocean. The international boundary between Canada and the United States runs down the centre ...

The geography of Juan de Fuca Channel

The Juan de Fuca Channel is a submarine canyon running from the

shelf break A continental shelf is a portion of a continent that is submerged under an area of relatively shallow water, known as a shelf sea. Much of these shelves were exposed by drops in sea level during glacial periods. The shelf surrounding an island ...

, off southern

Vancouver Island Vancouver Island is an island in the northeastern Pacific Ocean and part of the Canadian Provinces and territories of Canada, province of British Columbia. The island is in length, in width at its widest point, and in total area, while are o ...

Juan de Fuca Strait The Strait of Juan de Fuca (officially named Juan de Fuca Strait in Canada) is a body of water about long that is the Salish Sea's outlet to the Pacific Ocean. The international boundary between Canada and the United States runs down the centre ...

. The canyon is both narrow and deep and has sides that are steep. Over its width at the rim it drops from in depth to over deep at the

thalweg In geography and fluvial geomorphology, a thalweg or talweg () is the line of lowest elevation within a valley or watercourse. Under international law, a thalweg is the middle of the primary navigable channel of a waterway that defines the bounda ...

. Along a track, seismic profiles over Juan de Fuca Channel show the canyon consists of two distinct parts. The upper canyon is narrow, extending southwestward down the continental slope. This area has an average

gradient In vector calculus, the gradient of a scalar-valued differentiable function of several variables is the vector field (or vector-valued function) \nabla f whose value at a point p is the "direction and rate of fastest increase". If the gradi ...

of . It is there carved in consolidated or semi-consolidated material of the slope. The lower part of the channel trends northwestward, parallel to the shelf edge, with a gradient of only , terminating at the apex of

Nitinat fan Ditidaht (also Nitinaht, Nitinat, Southern Nootkan) or diitiidʔaaʔtx̣ is a South Wakashan (Nootkan) language spoken on the southern part of Vancouver Island. Nitinaht is related to the other South Wakashan languages, Makah and the neighboring ...

. The lower channel represents a small fan and valley feature. Further, Nitinat Fan was constructed on the deep-sea floor at what is the presently the terminus of Juan de Fuca Channel. Most of the shelf break canyons from

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

and north cross only part of the

continental shelf A continental shelf is a portion of a continent that is submerged under an area of relatively shallow water, known as a shelf sea. Much of these shelves were exposed by drops in sea level during glacial periods. The shelf surrounding an island ...

, and cut from the

toward the coast. Then well below the mixed layer, they end on the continental shelf. Different from other aquatic canyons, the Juan de Fuca Channel cuts the

and continues into the Strait of Juan de Fuca

The amount of water in the channel

The Juan de Fuca Channel reaches to the opening of the

, which separates the United States and Canada. The canyon is just less than wide and at least deep, that is, twice the depth of the surrounding

seafloor The seabed (also known as the seafloor, sea floor, ocean floor, and ocean bottom) is the bottom of the ocean The ocean (also the sea or the world ocean) is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of the surface of Earth an ...

More detail

For decades, it has been known that 20 to 30 times more deep water flows into Puget Sound than from all Earth's rivers combined, far bigger than the

Amazon River The Amazon River (, ; es, Río Amazonas, pt, Rio Amazonas) in South America is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world, and the disputed longest river system in the world in comparison to the Nile. The headwaters of t ...

. This flow is towards land, not away. New (''as of 2017'') measurements show this canyon may supply most of the water coming into

Puget Sound Puget Sound ( ) is a sound of the Pacific Northwest, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and part of the Salish Sea. It is located along the northwestern coast of the U.S. state of Washington. It is a complex estuarine system of interconnected ma ...

, the

, and Canada's

Georgia Strait The Strait of Georgia (french: Détroit de Géorgie) or the Georgia Strait is an arm of the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the extreme southwestern mainland coast of British Columbia, Canada and the extreme northwestern mainland coast ...

. The pattern of

water circulation The water cycle, also known as the hydrologic cycle or the hydrological cycle, is a biogeochemical cycle that describes the continuous movement of water on, above and below the surface of the Earth. The mass of water on Earth remains fairly cons ...

sends a dense lower layer of ocean water towards land, while the upper layer flows out to sea.

Its role

Juan de Fuca Channel appears to be a pathway, bringing deep Pacific water into the

Salish Sea , image = PNW-straits.jpg , alt = , caption = The Salish Sea, showing the open Pacific Ocean at lower left, and from there, heading inland: the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the narrow Puget Sound at lower ri ...

Life within

has famously rich water. There is reason for this; the channel pulls

nutrient A nutrient is a substance used by an organism to survive, grow, and reproduce. The requirement for dietary nutrient intake applies to animals, plants, fungi, and protists. Nutrients can be incorporated into cells for metabolic purposes or excret ...

-rich water from the

deep ocean The deep sea is broadly defined as the ocean depth where light begins to fade, at an approximate depth of 200 metres (656 feet) or the point of transition from continental shelves to continental slopes. Conditions within the deep sea are a combin ...

. Recent

measurements Measurement is the quantification of attributes of an object or event, which can be used to compare with other objects or events. In other words, measurement is a process of determining how large or small a physical quantity is as compared t ...

(''as of 2017'') may explain why this canyon helps the

Pacific Northwest The Pacific Northwest (sometimes Cascadia, or simply abbreviated as PNW) is a geographic region in western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Though ...

’s

inland waters According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a nation's internal waters include waters on the side of the baseline of a nation's territorial waters that is facing toward the land, except in archipelagic states. It includes wat ...

support so many

shellfish Shellfish is a colloquial and fisheries term for exoskeleton-bearing aquatic invertebrates used as food, including various species of molluscs, crustaceans, and echinoderms. Although most kinds of shellfish are harvested from saltwater envir ...

salmon run ''Salmon Run'' is a 1982 video game for the Atari 8-bit family created by Bill Williams and distributed via the Atari Program Exchange. ''Salmon Run'' was the first game in Williams's career, followed by a string of successes noted for their o ...

s and even pods of whales. Water surges up the channel, mixing at surprisingly high rates. The intense flow and mixing measured inside the Juan de Fuca Channel may help explain the formerly mysterious productivity of the shores of Washington; coastal winds usually bring in some nutrients, but the numbers don’t add up: "Washington is several times more productive – has more

phytoplankton Phytoplankton () are the autotrophic (self-feeding) components of the plankton community and a key part of ocean and freshwater ecosystems. The name comes from the Greek words (), meaning 'plant', and (), meaning 'wanderer' or 'drifter'. Ph ...

– than

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, and yet the

wind Wind is the natural movement of air or other gases relative to a planet's surface. Winds occur on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heating of land surfaces and lasting a few hou ...

s here are several times weaker. That’s been kind of a puzzle, for years," observes Matthew Alford, an oceanographer with the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

Applied Physics Laboratory The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (Applied Physics Laboratory, or APL) is a not-for-profit University Affiliated Research Center, university-affiliated research center (UARC) in Howard County, Maryland. It is affiliated w ...

. At below the surface, water has flowed as fast as , showing mixing up to 1,000 times the normal rate in the

. The flow is hydraulically-controlled, which means it flows smoothly over a shallow ridge just off

Cape Flattery Cape Flattery () is the northwesternmost point of the contiguous United States. It is in Clallam County, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula, where the Strait of Juan de Fuca joins the Pacific Ocean. It is also part of the Makah Reservation, and ...

then on the other side forms a turbulent breaking undersea wave, mixing with

surface water Surface water is water located on top of land forming terrestrial (inland) waterbodies, and may also be referred to as ''blue water'', opposed to the seawater and waterbodies like the ocean. The vast majority of surface water is produced by prec ...

far above. The deep water forced up through the channel is rich in nutrients, which support the growth of marine plants, which then feed other

marine life Marine life, sea life, or ocean life is the plants, animals and other organisms that live in the salt water of seas or oceans, or the brackish water of coastal estuaries. At a fundamental level, marine life affects the nature of the planet. M ...

. The water is more

acid In computer science, ACID ( atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps. In the context of databases, a sequ ...

ic, and lower in

oxygen Oxygen is the chemical element with the symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group in the periodic table, a highly reactive nonmetal, and an oxidizing agent that readily forms oxides with most elements as wel ...

, both of which contribute to water conditions in the

Fishing in the Juan de Fuca Canyon

"The location of this sill would be an outstanding place to fish," observes Matthew Alford, the oceanographer with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory. "People fish in Juan de Fuca Canyon pretty actively, and that’s probably no coincidence."

References

{{reflist

External links and references

One link

A geography link

* ttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/260412436_Flow_and_mixing_in_Juan_de_Fuca_Canyon_Washington Research on the Juan de Fuca Canyon
More research

Article from the San Francisco ''Chronicle''
Coastal and oceanic landforms