50 Fun Facts About Pacific Ocean

How does the Pacific rank among Earth's oceans?

It covers about 46% of the planet's water surface and nearly a third of its total surface.

The Pacific's area is larger than what?

At about 165 million square kilometres, it beats the planet's entire landmass of roughly 149 million.

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

After the storms off Cape Horn his fleet found calm water in 1520; the ocean was often called the Sea of Magellan until the 18th century.

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

He called it Mar del Sur because it lay south of the coast where he first saw it.

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

It lies in the Mariana Trench at 10,928 metres; the Horizon Deep in the Tonga Trench is the deepest point in the Southern Hemisphere.

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

It sits about 2,688 km from the nearest land in three directions and was pinpointed by Croatian engineer Hrvoje Lukatela in 1992.

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

The ocean has more islands than any other and they fall into three main groups: Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia.

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

The Equator separately divides it into a North and South Pacific, giving four quadrants.

Which passage connects the Pacific with the Arctic Ocean?

At the other end, Drake Passage and the Strait of Magellan link the Pacific to the Atlantic.

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

That is halfway around the world and more than five times the diameter of the Moon.

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

It loses about 2.5 cm a year on three sides while the Atlantic widens.

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

It belongs to Melanesia, along with the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji and New Caledonia.

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

It takes in the Marianas, Carolines, Marshalls and Kiribati.

The Austronesian peoples who first settled Remote Oceania originated on which island?

They spread with outrigger boats and crab-claw sails from about 3000 BCE, reaching as far as Madagascar in the west.

According to the migration timeline, Polynesian voyagers reached New Zealand around which year?

Hawaii was settled around 900 CE and Rapa Nui around 1000 CE, making New Zealand the last major landfall.

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

He brought the remains of the expedition home across the Indian Ocean and round the Cape of Good Hope.

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

The route ran from 1565 to 1815, made possible when Andrés de Urdaneta found a return path riding the Kuroshio Current.

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

Tasman followed in 1642, reaching Tasmania and New Zealand.

Which Danish-born officer led Russia's Great Northern Expedition to Alaska and the Aleutians?

The strait and sea between Siberia and Alaska carry his name.

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

Diogo Ribeiro's 1529 map was the first to show the Pacific at roughly its true size.

Which country annexed Easter Island in 1888?

Navy officer Policarpo Toro negotiated the deal with the Rapa Nui; the island is famous for its nearly 1,000 moai statues.

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

The crew drifted 6,900 km in 101 days from Peru before hitting a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotus.

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

The North Equatorial Current turns north near the Philippines to become it; on the other side of the ocean the cold Humboldt runs up South America.

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

The 40,000 km belt also holds around two-thirds of the world's active or dormant volcanoes.

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

Only the central North American coast and the Antarctic and Australian coasts lack them nearby.

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

The ocean was born about 750 million years ago when Rodinia split, but its oldest surviving seafloor is only around 180 million years old.

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

The Louisville Ridge is another long chain built the same way.

Peruvian fishermen named the El Niño warming after whom?

El Niño de Navidad was most noticeable around Christmas; La Niña is its cooler counterpart.

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

Storms in the northwest are called typhoons; those forming south of Mexico are hurricanes.

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

The names track latitude; the winds are strongest here because of the temperature gap between the tropics and Antarctica.

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

It is roughly three times the size of France and holds an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.

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

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer then dubbed the region the 'Eastern Garbage Patch'.

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

The atolls served as the Pacific Proving Grounds; Bikini's 1954 Castle Bravo shot alone yielded 15 megatons.

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

The atoll also lent its name to Bikini Bottom, home of SpongeBob SquarePants.

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

The nodules contain nickel, copper, cobalt and zinc, making the zone the focus of deep-sea mining plans.

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

He borrowed Magellan's description of 'a pacific sea' from the 1519-1522 circumnavigation.

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

Inside the line, lava oozes gently to build dome volcanoes; outside it, volcanism is explosive.

In 1898 the United States took Guam and the Philippines from Spain after which war?

By 1900 nearly every Pacific island was controlled by Britain, France, the US, Germany, Japan or Chile.

Which Pacific islands did France make protectorates in 1842 and 1853, respectively?

Those moves gave France a leading imperial position in Oceania.

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?

Its volume is estimated at some 714 million cubic kilometres.

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

He was sailing with Louis Antoine de Bougainville on the French voyage of exploration.

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

That is deep enough that the ocean's total volume tops 700 million cubic kilometres.

Which two straits together form the Indonesian Seaway joining the Pacific to the Indian Ocean?

On the American side, Drake Passage and the Strait of Magellan link the Pacific with the Atlantic.

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

Uplifted coral platforms are one of the four basic Pacific island types, along with continental islands, high islands and coral reefs.

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?

At 10,823 metres it is only slightly shallower than the Challenger Deep.

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

Equatorial waters can be as low as 34 parts per thousand thanks to year-round heavy rainfall.

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

Its southern arm chills into the slow, south-flowing California Current.

Catches in which sea off Russia have at least halved since the 1990s because of overfishing?

The 1965 Philippine Sea A-4 incident also left a one-megaton bomb lost somewhere in the Pacific.