Why Doesn’t the Oregon Coast Have More Islands?

I am a West Coaster for life; never lived anywhere else. When I talk to people from the East Coast, I hear about all these islands there that sound like great vacation spots and places to live. So how come we Pacific dwellers don’t seem to have anything similar? —Kayak Kevin

Our neighbors to the north might beg to differ with your bleak assessment, Kevin—after all, Puget Sound is lousy with islands. An old college friend of mine who went to the dark side and became a Washington lobbyist* actually has a house on one. (You can’t miss it; his island is the one shaped like a skull with a giant death ray sticking out of the top.)

This means you shouldn’t have to travel more than a few hundred miles to find a suitable island upon which to live, vacation, or be the subject of unspeakable, inhuman experiments. But you’re right that most West Coasters aren’t so lucky (if that’s the word I want). The East Coast is dotted with islands from Newfoundland to Texas; all we Westerners get is an almost unbroken chain of fuck-all between Astoria and Cabo San Lucas.

If it’s any consolation, this archipelagic famine is the horseman of an apocalypse you already know from more familiar cataclysms like earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes: the West Coast’s status as an “active continental margin.” You know the concept; two tectonic plates violently colliding beneath our feet, the entire West Coast is a ticking time bomb, blah, blah, etc.—stop me if you’ve heard this one.

The relevant part of all this for our current purposes is the way the Pacific plate actively dives beneath its North American counterpart. We don’t get the kind of broad, shallow continental shelf they have along the passive coastal margin of the Atlantic coast. All we get is a big, gnarly subduction trench where the sea floor plunges to thousands of feet deep within just a few dozen miles of shore. There’s no place for sediments to pile up and form islands, the way they do along the gently sloping Eastern Seaboard.

In short, not only are we all doomed, we don’t even get a nice, peaceful island where we can pitch a hammock and wait for the end. Meanwhile, our East Coast counterparts are sucking down mai tais with the Obamas on Martha’s Vineyard. Nobody ever said life was fair.

*Washington state, not Washington, D.C., but still.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.