Adaptation Support

Visualizing Sea Level Rise in Puget Sound

Overview

Sea level rise is - on a human timescale- fairly slow. While some places, like low-lying coastal areas, are already seeing dramatic impacts, it can also feel a bit like the adage of the frog in the pot of slowly heating water- you don't know how much trouble you are in until you get there, and if you wait that long, you may be too late to do much about it. How do we make it easier to visualize sea level rise in Puget Sound?

EcoAdapt is working on approaches that make it easier to visualize and grasp what sea level rise might look like for us. Through a partnership with Washington State Ferries and support from local funders, we are creating graphic displays for the pedestrian walkways that describe likely changes in Puget Sound sea levels over the coming century.

Objectives

With this work, we aim to:

Help residents and visitors visualize what the coming decades of sea level rise are likely to look like in Puget Sound
Spark reflection and conversations about what these changes mean for all of us: ourselves, our transportation, and our communities
Connect viewers to resources to learn more about sea level rise in Puget Sound and how jurisdictions and communities are thinking about adapting

Project Activities

Reverse Time Capsule: An interactive sea level rise sculpture

Traditional time capsules preserve the past, a reserve time capsule projects the future. This sculpture, designed by EcoAdapt, allows visitors to tangibly "experience" what climate projections anticipate for sea level rise.

Multiple community groups and a regional artist came together to create and install a Reverse Time Capsule for Sea Level Rise at Fay Bainbridge Park on the north end of Bainbridge Island. The Reverse Time Capsule invites visitors to interact with this sculpture, which is comprised of a base, set at current king tide height; a granite bench, the top of which is at projected mid-century sea level; and a 5-foot basalt column adjacent to the bench, which represents the upper end of current projects of sea level by end of century. Visitors are encouraged to sit on the bench and visualize what these sea levels might mean for the park and the Island. This project was just featured in the Bainbridge Review! Time will tell if this “reverse time capsule” plays out to accurately reflect Puget Sound’s rising tides.

We are grateful to the Rotary Club of Bainbridge Island and the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation for funding this project; to Bainbridge Island Metropolitan Parks & Recreation District for providing it a home and preparing the site for installation; and to Adrien Petersen and Artist Pete Welty for bringing it to life.

Bremerton Ferry Overhead Walkway Sea Level Rise Visualization

In 2025 EcoAdapt received a grant from the Kitsap Community Foundation to create graphics for the Bremerton Ferry passenger walkway to help riders visualize sea level rise. Installation was completed in August 2025, and you can now see this visualization on the passenger walkway at the Bremerton terminal!

Relative Sea Level Rise data informing this work:

Source: UW Climate Impacts Group

Multiple resources are available for modeling sea level rise. One local, robust source we use is data on relative sea level rise from the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group (CIG) to guide our visualizations. CIG's interactive data viewer allows the user to visualize sea level rise in a regionally specific way for multiple levels of emissions and likelihoods (1% likelihood to 99% based on a variety of modeling projections), where:

Low (Relative Concentration Pathway, or RCP 4.5) are a representation of what sea levels might look like if we immediately and rapidly reduced carbon emissions globally (we are not currently on this pathway)
High (RCP 8.5) pathways represent what sea levels are likely to look like under business-as-usual carbon emissions (we are far closer to this pathway currently)

Looking back at our last thirty years of sea level rise, projections have been remarkably consistent with what we have actually seen across the globe. Looking forward, nearer term (mid-century) estimates have greater certainty about the amount of sea level rise we are likely to experience, and projections become less certain over time. This is why in our graphical representation, we provide a mid-point estimate of about a foot of sea-level rise by mid-century; but estimates vary between about 2 and 5 feet by end of century. We know that sea levels will continue to increase over centuries to millennia based on the carbon we have already added to the atmosphere; however, how rapidly this rise occurs depends a lot on how quickly and well we can reduce carbon emissions over the coming decades.

Bainbridge Island Sea Level Rise Visualization

In 2024, EcoAdapt partnered with Hyla High School, WSF, and Sustainable Bainbridge to create graphics for the Bainbridge Island overhead passenger walkway. Read more about that project and related work here.

Resources

Want to learn more? Check out our growing list of tools and resources for learning more about sea level rise in Puget Sound

Workshops & Events

Unveiling of the Reverse Time Capsule: An interactive sea level rise sculpture

Wednesday, Jan 21 at 2pm, Fay Bainbridge State Park Bainbridge Island. Please join us and our partners for an official dedication of the Reverse Time Capsule at Fay Bainbridge State Park. We'll talk about the making and installation of the sculpture and you can try it out for yourself!

Head on down to the southern end of the parking lot - the sculpture is located near the top of the berm at the south end of the Park.