50 Fun Facts About Pacific Ocean

How does the Pacific rank among Earth's oceans?

The Pacific is both the largest and deepest ocean, covering about 165 million square kilometres, nearly a third of Earth's surface, with its deepest point near 10,900 metres.

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

All of Earth's land combined covers roughly 149 million square kilometres, less than the Pacific's 165 million; the other oceans together, the whole ocean surface and either hemisphere all exceed it.

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 waded into the water on September 29, 1513 and claimed the Mar del Sur for Spain; the name came from its lying south of the Panamanian coast where he stood.

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 captain, sits about 2,688 km from the nearest land (Ducie Island, Motu Nui and Maher Island); Croatian-Canadian engineer Hrvoje Lukatela computed it in 1992.

Roughly how many islands rise above the surface of the Pacific?

Estimates put the Pacific's islands at about 25,000, more than in all other oceans combined, most of them scattered across the western and southern Pacific.

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

The International Date Line, running roughly along the 180th meridian, is the informal East-West divider; the Equator separately splits the ocean into North and South Pacific.

Which passage connects the Pacific with the Arctic Ocean?

The Bering Strait, about 82 km wide between Siberia's Cape Dezhnev and Alaska's Cape Prince of Wales, is the Pacific's only link to the Arctic Ocean.

Where does the Pacific reach its greatest east-west width, about 19,800 km?

The widest span, about 19,800 km, runs along 5°N from the Indonesian coast to Colombia, nearly halfway around the globe and more than five times the Moon's diameter.

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

The Pacific is shrinking by roughly 2.5 cm a year as its floor is consumed beneath the surrounding plates, while seafloor spreading widens the Atlantic.

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

New Guinea covers about 786,000 square kilometres, second only to Greenland; Borneo, the next-largest island, is about 748,000.

Which of these Pacific island groups lies north of the equator and west of the date line?

Micronesia, the 'small islands', spans the Marianas, Carolines, Marshalls and Gilberts, almost entirely north of the equator and west of the date line.

The Austronesian peoples who first settled Remote Oceania originated on 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 reached New Zealand around which year?

New Zealand was settled from East Polynesia around 1200 CE, with the earliest firm dates falling in the late 1200s, making it the last major landmass humans reached.

Who completed the first circumnavigation of the world in 1522 after Magellan's death?

Juan Sebastián Elcano took command of the expedition after its captain-general died in the Philippines in 1521, and brought the Victoria home to Spain in September 1522 with 18 survivors.

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.

Which Dutch explorer made the first fully documented European landing in Australia in 1606?

Willem Janszoon, in the Duyfken, charted and landed on Cape York Peninsula's west coast in early 1606; Abel Tasman followed in 1642, reaching Tasmania and New Zealand.

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

Abel Tasman sailed for the Dutch East India Company from Batavia in 1642, sighting Tasmania (which he named Van Diemen's Land) and then New Zealand's west coast in December.

Which map, in 1507, was the first to show the Americas separating two distinct oceans?

Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, the first to use the name 'America', drew a separate ocean west of the New World six years before any European had seen it; Diogo Ribeiro's 1529 map first showed its true size.

Which country annexed Easter Island in 1888?

Chile annexed Easter Island on September 9, 1888 through a deed of cession signed with Rapa Nui chiefs; the island lies about 3,500 km west of the Chilean mainland.

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

The Kon-Tiki was lashed together from nine balsa logs cut in Ecuador; the crew drifted 6,900 km in 101 days from Peru before striking 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 North Pacific's western boundary current, the counterpart of the Gulf Stream; it forms where the North Equatorial Current turns north near the Philippines.

Roughly what share of the world's earthquakes occur within the Pacific Ring of Fire?

About 90% of the world's earthquakes strike along the Ring of Fire, a 40,000 km horseshoe of plate boundaries that also holds roughly three-quarters of Earth's active volcanoes.

The Pacific is the only ocean mostly bounded by what kind of tectonic feature?

Subduction zones ring most of the Pacific, where its plates dive beneath neighbours along deep trenches; only the central North American, Antarctic and Australian margins lack one nearby.

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

Panthalassa, Greek for 'all sea', surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea; the modern Pacific grew out of it, though its oldest surviving seafloor dates back only about 180 million years.

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

Hotspot volcanism built the chain as the Pacific plate moved over a fixed mantle plume, leaving a 6,000 km track of islands and seamounts that bends sharply where the plate changed direction.

Peruvian fishermen named the El Niño warming after whom?

El Niño means 'the Christ Child' in Spanish: Peruvian fishermen noticed the warm current arriving around Christmas and called it El Niño de Navidad; La Niña is the cool phase.

Which two ocean basins are the world's most active for tropical cyclones?

The northwestern Pacific, where storms are called typhoons, averages about 26 tropical cyclones a year and the eastern Pacific about 16, the two busiest basins on Earth.

Sailors call the stormy Southern Hemisphere westerlies the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties and what?

The Shrieking Sixties, also called the Screaming Sixties, lie between 60° and 70°S, where westerlies circle Antarctica with almost no land to slow them; the names track latitude.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch floats between California and which country?

The patch stretches across the North Pacific Gyre from North America's west coast to Japan; a 2018 survey put its densest core at 1.6 million square kilometres holding about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.

Who came upon the Great Pacific Garbage Patch while sailing home from a 1997 yacht race?

Charles Moore, a California sailor who ran the Algalita marine research foundation, crossed the debris field in 1997 returning from the Transpacific Yacht Race; oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer named it the 'Eastern Garbage Patch'.

The Marshall Islands hosted how many US nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958?

The United States detonated 67 nuclear devices at Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958, the Pacific Proving Grounds; the 1954 Castle Bravo shot alone yielded 15 megatons.

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

Godzilla (Gojira) premiered in November 1954, months after Castle Bravo fallout contaminated the fishing boat Lucky Dragon No. 5 near the test; the film opens with a boat destroyed by a flash at sea.

Which fracture zone between Mexico and Hawaii holds the largest deposits of manganese nodules?

The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, about 4.5 million square kilometres between Hawaii and Mexico, holds an estimated 21 billion tonnes of nodules rich in manganese, nickel, copper and cobalt.

Which cartographer first mapped the Pacific under the name Maris Pacifici?

Abraham Ortelius published Maris Pacifici in 1589, the first printed map devoted to the ocean, decorated with the ship Victoria that had completed the 1519-22 circumnavigation.

The petrologic boundary separating the deep central Pacific from its continental margins is called what?

The andesite line separates the basaltic central Pacific, where fluid lava builds broad shield volcanoes, from the margins where silica-rich andesitic magma fuels explosive eruptions.

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

The Spanish–American War of 1898 ended with the Treaty of Paris, which transferred Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico to the United States for a payment of $20 million.

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

France declared a protectorate over Tahiti in 1842 and formally annexed New Caledonia on September 24, 1853, giving it a lasting presence in both Polynesia and Melanesia.

Which of these seas is NOT one of the Pacific's marginal seas?

The Caribbean belongs to the Atlantic; the Pacific's list runs from the Philippine Sea round to the Tasman and Coral Seas.

The Pacific holds roughly what share of the world's ocean water by volume?

About half of all seawater, roughly 714 million cubic kilometres, lies in the Pacific, which alone outweighs the Atlantic and Indian Oceans' volumes combined.

Which astronomer first measured the width of the Pacific with precision, in 1768?

Pierre-Antoine Véron, the young astronomer aboard Bougainville's La Boudeuse, used lunar-distance longitude observations in 1768 to establish the ocean's east-west width for the first time.

The Pacific's mean depth is roughly how many metres?

The Pacific's mean depth is about 4,000 metres (around 4,280 by some measures), deeper than the Atlantic's roughly 3,600; its floor reaches nearly 11,000 metres in the Mariana Trench.

Which strait, between Borneo and Sulawesi, carries most of the Indonesian Throughflow?

The Makassar Strait, between Borneo and Sulawesi, carries roughly three-quarters of the Indonesian Throughflow, the flow of Pacific water into the Indian Ocean that totals about 15 million cubic metres per second.

Which uplifted coral island in Kiribati was formerly known as Ocean Island?

Banaba, an uplifted coral island of about six square kilometres, was called Ocean Island under British rule; phosphate mining from 1900 to 1979 stripped it and most Banabans were resettled on Rabi in Fiji.

Which Chilean navy officer negotiated Easter Island's incorporation into Chile in 1888?

By occupying the island Chile joined the imperial nations of the Pacific.

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

The Tonga Trench, where the Pacific plate dives beneath the Tonga plate, holds Horizon Deep at about 10,820 metres, second only to the Mariana Trench's deepest point.

The Pacific's surface salinity peaks at about 37 parts per thousand in which part of the ocean?

Salinity peaks near 37 parts per thousand in the southeast, in the dry subtropical belt off South America where evaporation far outpaces rain; equatorial waters, drenched year-round, fall to about 34.

The Kuroshio forks at about 45 degrees north, with some water heading north under which name?

The Aleutian Current carries the northern arm toward the Gulf of Alaska, feeding the Alaska Current along that coast, while the southern arm cools into the slow, south-flowing California Current.

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.