Inside the Seattle Aquarium’s new tropical exhibit

ELLIOTT BAY, Wash. – The Seattle Aquarium’s new Ocean Pavilion transports passersby from the concrete shore of the Salish Sea – with groaning ferry horns, electric bikes whizzing by and schools of pedestrians spilling off nearby cruise ships – to a tropical oasis.

The building’s design, overseen by Seattle-based architecture firm LMN and Thinc Design, is state-of-the-art. Gone are the dark tunnels illuminated by exhibits in traditional aquariums. At the cedar, concrete and glass Ocean Pavilion, natural light and a view of the bay are blended with blissful scenes from the turquoise seas and mangrove trees of Indonesia.

The cars and trucks that once rumbled through downtown Seattle on the Alaskan Way Viaduct have been replaced by a coral canyon with a charismatic cast of creatures. Spotted eagle rays soar, yellow-lipped brown spotted fish follow visitors between windows of the tank and an Indo-Pacific leopard shark glides over the yellow sand.

The facility, open to the public Thursday, is a crown jewel of not only Seattle’s remade waterfront but also the aquarium’s breeding program that aims to restore an endangered shark to its native waters, thousands of miles away.

Regenerative aquarium

The Seattle Aquarium’s new Ocean Pavilion aims to be a model for future sustainable and carbon-neutral public spaces. Compared to similar aquariums, architects say the building’s innovative design is estimated to reduce day-to-day energy use by 70% and carbon emissions by 95%. The building is 100% fossil fuel – free, instead relying on electrical energy and heat exchange within the building’s water and air circulation systems. Construction on the Ocean Pavilion began in late 2020, and it is planned to open to the public Aug. 29. The rooftop is expected to open later in the fall. The Seattle Aquarium hopes to become the world’s first “regenerative aquarium” by 2030.

Like any large institution dedicated to highlighting Earth’s natural wonders, the Seattle Aquarium has a challenging task. Aquarium officials hope to inspire thousands of daily visitors to take action to protect habitats and creatures they may never encounter in the wild – without contributing to the very thing accelerating their demise. But can they pull off the delicate balance?

In 2020, nearly 100 local leaders and residents signed a letter asking the aquarium board to turn away from the energy-intensive tropical tank and consider smaller-scale and virtual exhibits focused on protecting orcas, restoring salmon and other local environmental challenges.

The blueprint for the Ocean Pavilion changed significantly since the project’s early days, aquarium officials have said, with upgrades such as recirculating 96% of the saltwater, rather than constantly pumping from Elliott Bay and back into the municipal water system.

Previous reporting suggested the expansion could boost the aquarium’s carbon footprint by nearly a third, but the actual impact won’t be clear until a year into operations, aquarium officials said.

The Ocean Pavilion is the aquarium’s first fully electric endeavor, employing a massive heat-exchanger and heat pumps to warm the more than 500,000-gallon tropical tank and heat and cool the 50,000-square-foot building.

The aquarium will seek one of the most rigorous sustainable-building certifications that will require it to pay to bring renewable resources, including solar, into the Northwest grid.

Aquarium leaders hope to use the pavilion to talk about the threats facing the ocean, said Erin Meyer, Seattle Aquarium chief conservation officer and a marine biologist. “And to inspire people to have empathy and care and take action in their own daily lives.”

A waterfront saga

Through the doors, handblown glass salmon by Lummi Nation artist Kwul Kwul Tw, or Dan Friday, lead visitors to a tropical world.

Here, a plaque explains that although the vulnerable Coral Triangle between the Pacific and Indian oceans is over 7,000 miles away from the Salish Sea, “we all share common waters, challenges, and needs.”

One ticket will get visitors into the whole aquarium campus. Tickets vary from $16.77 to $52.85 depending on residency and age and can be bought online.

From the star attraction, “The Reef,” where the Indo-Pacific leopard sharks, blue-spotted eagle rays and thousands of other fish live, visitors can ascend the stairs to a second habitat, “The Archipelago,” to see a glimpse of an Indonesian mangrove forest at the surface with a coral reef below.

The coral canyon was designed after a very specific site in Northern Raja Ampat in Indonesia, Meyer said. Five years ago, when the aquarium was in its exploratory phase for expanding conservation programs into the Coral Triangle, members of the animal care team went to the site to experience the habitats in person. That knowledge was brought back to help emulate the habitat in the Ocean Pavilion.

“When I went underwater for the first time in Indonesia, I came up literally in tears,” Meyer said. “It was the first time that I had seen a healthy coral reef, and that’s a direct result of marine protections of community leadership and decade over a decade of work by community leaders to protect those spaces.”

“When you see a healthy one, it really inspires you to do the work that we do.”

Wander through the vibrant exhibits of “At Home in the Ocean,” where neon orange tentacles of a sea anemone glow and wave to clownfish and squiggly garden eels emerge from the sand, to get a feel for a dive in the Indonesian South Pacific.

Above, the rooftop of the pavilion will finally reconnect Pike Place Market and the waterfront. When it opens to the public this fall, the city’s Overlook Walk will have play areas, public plazas, a cafe and adjacent covered seating, with native landscaping led by Valerie Segrest, an enrolled Muckleshoot citizen and a Native nutrition educator. Access to these areas will be open and free to anyone.

The aquarium’s expansion is a milestone in over two decades of planning around Seattle’s $750 million waterfront development. The Ocean Pavilion itself is estimated to cost $160 million – final costs for construction and additional details are still being sorted, aquarium officials say – up from an estimate of $113 million in 2019.

Pier 59 was renovated in 2007 but not until the viaduct’s removal was decided did discussion ramp up about a new-look waterfront and open the door for a new pavilion on an upland site. The aquarium was a city-run and -owned institution until 2010, when the nonprofit Seattle Aquarium Society was incorporated to take over day-to-day operations.

The city still owns the aquarium’s buildings and has input in its future.

The city pledged $34 million and assisted in the acquisition of a $67 million loan to help the aquarium complete the project, as costs ballooned. An additional roughly $23 million came from a mix of funds from the state, King County, Port of Seattle and federal sources.

Former Seattle City Councilmembers Kshama Sawant and Alex Pedersen voted against a measure to loan the aquarium another $20 million in 2022 after hearing members of the public criticize the idea of the city lending any more money to something they considered nonessential, as residents struggle to afford even basic housing in Seattle.

Animal rights advocates have also said they believe the tank is incompatible for the sharks and the money allocated by the City Council could have been better spent on affordable housing or transportation needs.

The 2022 legislation passed 7-2. The aquarium said it has paid back the $20 million loan and is continuing to raise funds from private donors.

Offsetting carbon emissions

Leading up to the Ocean Pavilion’s debut, the aquarium touted its sustainability progress, goals and conservation work: The new Ocean Pavilion is fully electric, and Puget Sound saltwater heated to tropical temperatures for the tank can also be used to heat and cool the building.

When the expansion is complete, the tropical beings in the aquarium’s original buildings will be moved into the Ocean Pavilion, and the aquarium will decommission the current Pacific coral reef exhibits. This will leave only the temperate water habitats in Pier 59 and 60, allowing those buildings, which house harbor seals, jellies and salmon, to also solely run on electricity.

The aquarium’s cafeteria is partially powered by solar but still relies on methane gas. Meyer said officials plan to eventually upgrade the appliances to be entirely electric.

The Northwest has rigorous building codes compared to other places in the country and most cities here require new buildings to be LEED Gold certified as their baseline, said Chris Hellstern, a Seattle architect with Miller Hull, who specializes in sustainable building and design certifications.

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It’s a voluntary rating system devised by the U.S. Green Building Council in 1998 to score and certify the sustainability of new and planned buildings and their surroundings based on their water, heating, lighting efficiency and use of “responsibly” sourced materials.

The Seattle Aquarium is also seeking a “Zero Carbon Certification” from the International Living Future Institute, a more stringent sustainability rating that focuses on greenhouse-gas-free goals, Hellstern said.

The certification requires the building to be electric and demonstrate from a year of operation that it meets an all-electric standard.

It also requires buildings to use renewable energy. In this case, because there are no solar panels at the aquarium, the building must invest to add more renewable energy capacity to the grid.

Supporting the Ocean Pavilion’s more than half a million gallon, warm, salty slice of the coral triangle is 680 cubic yards of concrete.

The architecture firm LMN told the Seattle Times the Ocean Pavilion uses a lower-carbon concrete mix. The carpets are made from recycled fishing nets, and the cedar on the exterior of the building was sourced from Taan Forest, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Haida Enterprise Corporation. The wood came from Haida Gwaii, B.C.

True zero-carbon buildings are not possible now, Hellstern said. Instead, buying “responsible” carbon offsets – or the investment into projects like planting trees, preserving forests or restoring ecosystems that are intended to suck up and store carbon that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere – can lower the project’s impact on climate, Hellstern said.

Offsetting carbon emissions has been a controversial practice with past studies finding that some companies that manage carbon offsets fail to ensure projects make a real difference to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

The Seattle Aquarium said it has offset all of its Scope 1 and 2 emissions since 2012. Scope 1 emissions are considered direct emissions like combustion related to on-site natural gas use or company-owned vehicles, and Scope 2 emissions are related to electricity use. Since 2019, it has paid to offset some Scope 3 emissions, which in its case includes emissions from business travel, buying animal feed and employee commutes.

The aquarium buys power from Seattle City Light.

The offsets have included investments in projects like a reserve in Indonesia that protects peat swamps. The aquarium said it plans to offset all carbon associated with building and operating the new pavilion.

According to data provided by the aquarium, the aquarium’s overall tracked emissions have averaged about 447 metric tons annually over the last 10 years. The Ocean Pavilion has yet to come fully online but is anticipated to usher in a wave of electrification.

With pumps and heaters that must run continuously, Seattle Aquarium is among the city’s more energy-intensive commercial complexes.

For an aquarium, Hellstern said the building should be considered a “model” locally and nationally.

“The technology is certainly there, the engineering solutions we certainly have,” he said. “It’s really just the will of people wanting to make these commitments.”