San Pedro Bay

San Pedro Bay is an inlet on the Pacific Ocean coast of southern California, United States. It is the site of the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach, which together form the fifth-busiest port facility in the world and the busiest in the Americas. The community of San Pedro, Los Angeles borders a small portion on the western side of the bay, and shares the name. The city of Long Beach borders the port on the eastern side of the bay. The northern part of the bay which is the largest part of the port is bordered by the community of Wilmington in the city of Los Angeles.
Most of the bay is between 32 and 75 feet deep. The seabed near Long Beach has experienced considerable subsidence as a result of oil extraction in the Wilmington Field from the 1950s onward. Ironically, this helped the Port of Long Beach surpass the Port of Los Angeles as the leading port in the United States for a time in the 1980s and 1990s, since the deeper seafloor meant that Long Beach could accommodate ships with deeper drafts than could Los Angeles. Dredging operations related to the construction of a gigantic new marine terminal at the Port of Los Angeles have since made both sides of the bay accessible to even the largest existing container ships. Concerns regarding subsidence increased until Operation "Big Squirt," a water injection program, halted any progression of sinking land in 1960.

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