The Salish Sea comprises Puget Sound, Bellingham Bay, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Georgia, Haro and Rosario and adjacent waters in an inlet of the North Pacific Ocean between about 47º north latitude and 50º55’ N and between 125º10’ west longitude and 122º11’ W.
The Salish Sea & Surrounding Basin. Courtesy Western Washington University. Map and accompanying text by Stefan Freelan, 2009.
Saltwater surface area: 18,000 square kilometres/7,000 square miles.
Drainage basin area: 110,000 sq km/42,000 sq mi. (Note that this metric excludes most of the 220,000-sq-km/85,000-sq-mi Fraser River watershed, which supplies nearly half the freshwater component of the giant estuary that is the Salish Sea.)
Shoreline extent, including 419 islands: 7,470 km/4,642 mi.
Salish Sea Facts, SeaDoc Society
The Salish Sea has two inlets. The larger is the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a major waterway giving access to the ports of Seattle, Washington (metro population 3.5 million) and Vancouver, British Columbia (2.5 million) and many smaller ports. North of the Strait of Georgia, the inland sea ebbs and flows through Johnstone Strait, between Vancouver Island and the continental mainland. (Johnstone Strait is not itself within the catchment of the Salish Sea.)
The invented name Salish Sea was proposed by Prof. Bert Webber, Western Washington University, in 1988, was accepted by Salish First Nations on both sides of the border, and by 2010 was recognized (without abridging the force of existing names) by the governments of Washington, the United States, British Columbia and Canada.