Oysterville, Willapa Bay

Oysterville, Willapa Bay

by | May 7, 2021

Oysterville is located on the Long Beach Peninsula in Willapa Bay, about 28 miles (45 km) north-northwest of Astoria and 17 miles (27 km) southwest of Raymond, Washington. The Long Beach Peninsula is a sand spit that separates Willapa Bay from the Pacific Ocean and is known for its continuous sandy beaches on the Pacific Ocean side. The peninsula is 22 miles (35 km) long and claimed to be the longest beach in the contiguous United States.

Willapa Bay is the second-largest estuary on the U.S. Pacific coast with an area over 260 square miles (67,340 ha). The bay is known for its biodiversity and much of it has been set aside as part of the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge that includes over 15,000 acres (6070 ha) of tidelands, temperate rainforest, ocean beaches, and small streams. It also includes several rare remnants of the old-growth coastal cedar forest.

Willapa Bay is home to a local oyster and seafood processing industry and approximately 9% of all oysters in the U.S. are grown here. Oyster farming is aquaculture practiced since the 1st century BC in Europe but is now being threatened by ocean acidification. The ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and becomes more acidic and corrosive, and this affects oysters (and other shellfish) because the young larvae cannot produce calcium carbonate fast enough to grow their shells. Read more here and here. Explore more of Oysterville here:

About the background graphic

This ‘warming stripe’ graphic is a visual representation of the change in global temperature from 1850 (top) to 2022 (bottom). Each stripe represents the average global temperature for one year. The average temperature from 1971-2000 is set as the boundary between blue and red. The color scale goes from -0.7°C to +0.7°C. The data are from the UK Met Office HadCRUT4.6 dataset. 

Credit: Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading). Click here for more information about the #warmingstripes.

Please report any errors here

error: Content is protected !!