Features
Kachemak Bay is home to Alaska's only state wilderness park, Kachemak Bay State Park. Kachemak Bay State park was the first state park in Alaska. There is no road access to most of the park; visitors must arrive by airplane or boat.
Kachemak Bay is also home to the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, the largest reserve in the National Estuarine Research Reserve System. It is a very active site of research and education. The bay hosts a remarkably high level of biological activity, due in part to water circulation patterns which keep shellfish larve and nutrients in the bay. While surface waters push nutrients out into the bay, ocean currents push them back into the bay, creating a very fertile environment. Both fish and shellfish are abundant in the bay, year-round. Waterfowl and shorebirds occupy the bay during all but the winter season, while waterbirds and marine mammals including otters, seals, porpoise, and whales remain in the bay all year. The bay provides winter homes for 90% of the seabird and waterfowl populations of Lower Cook Inlet. Land mammals are frequently seen during the warmer seasons. Moose, coyote, and bears are frequently seen.
The tides at Kachemak Bay are extreme, with an average vertical difference (also called mean range) of over fifteen feet (15.53ft, 4.73m), and recorded extremes of over thirty-one feet (31.72ft, 9.67m) as measured at the Seldovia Tide Station. The highest tide on record is over twenty-five feet (25.25ft, 7.7m) above MLLW and occurred on November 15th, 1966. The lowest tide on record is almost minus six and a half feet (-6.47ft, -1.97m) from MLLW and occurred on April 27th, 2002.
Read more about this topic: Kachemak Bay
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“Art is the child of Nature; yes,
Her darling child, in whom we trace
The features of the mother’s face,
Her aspect and her attitude.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)