Founded in 1987 by a collective of oceanographers and acoustic ecologists, the Pacific Shelf Acoustic Lab began as a modest field station on Fidalgo Island, equipped with a single hydrophone and a reel-to-reel recorder. What started as an informal gathering of graduate students and independent researchers has grown into one of the most respected independent archives of underwater sound on the West Coast.
Our mission is twofold: to preserve the vanishing acoustic landscapes of the Pacific continental shelf and deep-water canyons, and to provide hands-on training for emerging specialists in marine bioacoustics. Unlike commercial or government institutions, we operate without funding constraints that limit research scope, allowing our fellows to pursue long-term, unconventional projects that commercial pressures would not tolerate.
The lab maintains an active network of 14 hydrophone stations spanning from the Salish Sea to the Cascadia margin, recording continuously since 2003. Our archive now holds over 180,000 hours of uncompressed audio, representing one of the longest-running continuous acoustic monitoring programs in the Northeast Pacific.
