Channel Islands National Park includes Santa Rosa Island, a virtual natural history museum with miles of uncrowded trails and breathtaking cliff-top ocean views.
As we explored out into and under our seas, there too we found features worth naming. While today, naming an underwater feature is a formalized process coordinated by international organizations, many names of underwater features reflect the history of how, and often who, discovered them. Your national marine sanctuaries have names too, usually derived from the geographic area they encompass or the resources they protect. But where did those names come from in the first place? Let’s take a voyage and learn the stories behind the names of some of the nation’s most important ocean places.