50 Fun Facts About Pacific Ocean

How does the Pacific rank among Earth's oceans?

Largest and deepest: the Pacific covers nearly a third of Earth's surface, and if Mount Everest were dropped into its deepest trench, the summit would sit more than 2 km underwater.

Which of these has a smaller area than the Pacific Ocean?

All of Earth's land combined covers about 149 million square kilometres against the Pacific's 165 million, so every continent could be dropped into this one ocean with room to spare.

Which explorer named the ocean 'Mar Pacífico', meaning peaceful sea?

Ferdinand Magellan entered the ocean on November 28, 1520 after a stormy passage through the strait later named for him, and called the calm water he met Mar Pacífico.

Which Spanish explorer crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and named the ocean the 'South Sea'?

Vasco Núñez de Balboa sighted the ocean from a peak in Darién, then marched down to the shore and claimed the Mar del Sur and every land it touched for Spain; he named it for lying south of the isthmus.

What is the deepest known point in the world's oceans?

Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench, measures about 10,930 metres; Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reached it in the bathyscaphe Trieste in 1960.

The Pacific's most remote spot, farthest from any land, is known as what?

Point Nemo, named for Jules Verne's submarine captain, lies about 2,688 km from the nearest land; it is so remote that space agencies steer dying spacecraft, among them the Mir station, into the sea around it.

The Galápagos Islands, the Pacific archipelago where Darwin gathered evidence for evolution, belong to which country?

Ecuador took possession of the Galápagos in 1832, three years before Darwin landed; for almost 300 years before that, the islands had been left to pirates and whalers.

What informally splits the Pacific into an East Pacific and a West Pacific?

The International Date Line roughly follows the 180th meridian but zigzags: in 1995 Kiribati pushed it far to the east so the whole country would share the same calendar day.

Which passage connects the Pacific with the Arctic Ocean?

The Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, is the Pacific's only link to the Arctic Ocean; during the last ice age it was dry land, a bridge that people and animals crossed between the two continents.

At its widest, the Pacific spans more than five times the diameter of which body?

The Moon is only about 3,475 km across, while the Pacific at its widest stretches almost halfway around the globe, a distance greater than the Earth's own diameter.

Because of plate tectonics, what is slowly happening to the Pacific Ocean?

It is shrinking by a few centimetres a year: as the geologist Harry Hess reasoned, the Earth is not growing, so any ocean that widens must be paid for by one that narrows.

Which is the largest island in the Pacific and the world's second largest after Greenland?

New Guinea is second in size only to Greenland; until seas rose at the end of the last ice age and flooded the Torres Strait, it was joined by dry land to the continent to its south.

Which Pacific island region lies mostly north of the equator and includes Guam, Palau and the Caroline Islands?

Micronesia changed hands fast: in 1899 much of it passed from one European empire to another, and within fifty years it had gone through Japan's hands into United States trusteeship.

Most scholars trace the Austronesian seafarers who settled the Pacific islands back to which island?

Taiwan is the homeland in the 'Out of Taiwan' model: Austronesian speakers left it around 3000 BCE with outrigger canoes and crab-claw sails, eventually reaching Madagascar in the west and Hawaii in the east.

Polynesian voyagers who settled New Zealand about 700 years ago became which people?

Māori descend from East Polynesians who reached New Zealand by canoe; within about a century of their arrival, hunting had wiped out the moa, the islands' giant flightless birds.

Which ship, the only one of a fleet of five to finish, completed the first circumnavigation of the world in 1522?

Victoria reached Spain in September 1522, three years after setting out, under the Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano, who took charge of her after the fleet's leader was killed in the Philippines.

The Manila galleons linked the Philippines with which Mexican port for 250 years?

Acapulco received the galleons from 1565 to 1815; Andrés de Urdaneta's discovery of an eastbound return route across the North Pacific made the 250-year trade possible.

Where did Willem Janszoon's ship Duyfken make the first recorded European landing in 1606?

Australia's first recorded European landing came on Cape York, 164 years before James Cook arrived; Janszoon charted the coast without ever realising he had found a new continent.

Abel Tasman sailed for which trading company when he reached New Zealand in 1642?

The Dutch East India Company sent Abel Tasman to find new trade routes; he became the first European to reach New Zealand, but sailed on after a clash with local warriors left four of his crew dead.

Which name first appeared on the 1507 Waldseemüller map, which also showed an ocean west of the New World?

America made its debut on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 map, in honour of Amerigo Vespucci; the map also drew a separate western ocean six years before any European reached its eastern shore.

Which country annexed Easter Island in 1888?

Chile annexed Easter Island in 1888, then let almost all of it be run as a sheep ranch; the Rapa Nui islanders were confined to the single town of Hanga Roa until the 1960s.

Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki raft was built from which wood?

Balsa logs formed the Kon-Tiki, built in Peru to an ancient design; Heyerdahl and five companions drifted for 101 days before smashing into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotus.

What is the warm current that flows north past Japan called?

The Kuroshio, or 'Black Stream', is the Pacific's answer to the Gulf Stream; in 1565 the navigator Andrés de Urdaneta rode it away from the Philippines, opening the galleons' route home to Mexico.

Which zone around the Pacific's edge produces most of the world's earthquakes?

The Ring of Fire is not one structure but a chain of separate boundaries where the Pacific plate meets its neighbours, which also makes it the most volcanically active zone on Earth.

The Pacific's rim is lined mostly with what kind of tectonic feature?

Subduction zones ring most of the Pacific, which is why its rim is lined with the deepest trenches on Earth and with long chains of volcanoes.

What was the ancestral Pacific called before the break-up of Pangaea?

Panthalassa surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea, and the Pacific is its direct continuation; yet none of that ancient floor survives, since the oldest Pacific seabed is only about 200 million years old.

The Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain was formed by what process?

Hotspot volcanism built the chain: as the Pacific plate slid over a plume of hot rock, each new volcano was carried away in turn, so the islands grow steadily older toward the northwest.

Peruvian fishermen named the El Niño warming after whom?

The Christ Child, El Niño de Navidad in Spanish, gave the warming its name because Peruvian fishermen saw the warm current arrive around Christmas; the cool phase later became La Niña, 'the girl'.

Tropical cyclones in the northwestern Pacific, the world's busiest storm basin, go by what name?

Typhoons and hurricanes are the same kind of storm; only the location differs, and the northwestern Pacific spawns almost a third of the world's tropical cyclones, more than any other basin.

Which belt of strong westerly winds once sped sailing ships across the southern Pacific?

The Roaring Forties blow between 40 and 50 degrees south, where almost no land stands in the way to slow them; sailors named the belts beyond them the Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties.

What holds the Great Pacific Garbage Patch together in the open ocean?

A gyre of circling currents pulls the debris together; despite the name it is no island of trash but a thin scatter of mostly tiny plastic pieces, too sparse to show up in satellite images.

Which film director piloted a submersible alone to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 2012?

James Cameron, the director of Titanic, became the first person to reach the trench floor alone and spent a few hours exploring it; a year later he handed his submersible to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for research.

From 1946 to 1958 the United States tested dozens of nuclear weapons in which Pacific island group?

The Marshall Islands' Bikini and Enewetak atolls took the blasts; the 1954 Castle Bravo bomb proved two and a half times as powerful as predicted and spread fallout far beyond the test zone.

The 1954 Castle Bravo test on Bikini Atoll helped inspire which Japanese film that year?

Godzilla reached Japanese cinemas in late 1954, months after Castle Bravo fallout sickened the crew of the tuna boat Lucky Dragon No. 5; the film opens with a ship destroyed at sea.

The seabed of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, between Hawaii and Mexico, is carpeted with which sought-after resource?

Manganese nodules, lumps that take several million years to grow a single centimetre, litter the zone; miners want them for the nickel, copper and cobalt they also contain.

The 1820 loss of the Nantucket ship Essex in the Pacific inspired which classic novel?

Moby-Dick drew on the Essex disaster: a sperm whale rammed and sank the ship, and the story of the crew's ordeal in open boats became a seed of Herman Melville's novel.

Measured from its base on the Pacific floor, which Hawaiian volcano is often called the world's tallest mountain?

Mauna Kea rises more than 10,000 metres from its base on the seabed, topping Mount Everest by over a kilometre, yet more than half of that height is hidden underwater.

After which 1898 war did the United States acquire Guam and the Philippines?

The Spanish–American War ended with Spain ceding Guam and Puerto Rico and giving up the Philippines for $20 million; Filipinos then fought their new rulers for three more years.

Which Pacific islands did France take control of in 1842 and 1853, respectively?

Tahiti and New Caledonia both stayed French; from 1864 France used New Caledonia as a penal colony, shipping out some 22,000 convicts and political prisoners, rebels of the Paris Commune among them.

Which of these seas lies on the far side of Panama from the Pacific?

The Caribbean Sea is not part of the Pacific at all, though at Panama only a narrow strip of land separates them; a ship taking the canal from the Caribbean to the Pacific comes out farther east than it went in.

Which ocean ranks second to the Pacific in the volume of water it holds?

The Atlantic Ocean ranks second today, yet it is a latecomer: it only began to open when the supercontinent Pangaea broke apart, some 180 to 200 million years ago.

James Cook's first Pacific voyage, launched in 1768, was sent to observe which astronomical event?

The transit of Venus in 1769 was only the public goal; Cook also carried secret orders to go on and search for a great unknown southern continent.

Roughly how deep is the Pacific Ocean on average?

About 4,000 metres is the Pacific's average depth; no sunlight at all reaches below about 1,000 metres, so most of the ocean lies in permanent darkness.

Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific in 1937 during an attempt to do what?

Fly around the world: she had covered about 22,000 miles and had 7,000 left, all of them over the Pacific, when her plane went missing on the way to tiny Howland Island.

Banaba and Nauru, two small Pacific islands, were stripped bare in the 20th century by mining for what?

Phosphate was strip-mined on both islands for most of the century; after the Second World War the British resettled many Banabans on Rabi Island in Fiji, and the mining of their home went on until 1979.

Mutineers from which British ship hid on remote Pitcairn Island in 1790, where their descendants still live?

HMS Bounty's mutineers set fire to the ship once they reached Pitcairn so that it could not give them away; nine of them and their Polynesian companions founded the community that survives there.

Horizon Deep, the deepest point in the Southern Hemisphere, lies in which ocean trench?

The Tonga Trench holds Horizon Deep, nearly 11 km down; the plutonium fuel from Apollo 13's lunar module also lies in or near it, having plunged into the sea there when the crippled mission came home in 1970.

Why is the Pacific's surface water less salty near the equator than in the subtropics?

Heavy year-round rainfall dilutes the surface water along the equator; in the drier belts to either side, evaporation wins out and the sea grows saltier.

Which cold current flowing north along the coast of Peru feeds one of the world's richest fisheries?

The Humboldt Current draws cold, nutrient-rich water up to the surface, feeding huge shoals of anchovies and sardines; when El Niño shuts that upwelling down, the fishery slumps.

Which Russian peninsula, with about 30 active volcanoes, separates the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific?

Kamchatka's 1,250 km peninsula holds about 30 active volcanoes, including 4,750-metre Klyuchevskaya Sopka, Eurasia's highest active volcano; its east coast faces the open Pacific.