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The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continents of Asia and Australia in the west and the Americas in the east.
1851 map of Pacific listing colonial names of individual islands. Since the beginning of the 19th century, Australia and the islands of the Pacific have been grouped by geographers into a region called Oceania. [17] [18] It is often used as a quasi-continent, with the Pacific Ocean being the defining characteristic. [19]
Geology of the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean evolved in the Mesozoic from the Panthalassic Ocean, which had formed when Rodinia rifted apart around 750 Ma. The first ocean floor which is part of the current Pacific Plate began 160 Ma to the west of the central Pacific and subsequently developed into the largest oceanic plate on Earth.
In 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and encountered the Pacific Ocean, calling it the South Sea. In 1521, a Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan was the first recorded crossing of the Pacific Ocean, Magellan then naming it the "peaceful sea."
The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. [8] In English, the term ocean also refers to any of the large bodies of water into which the world ocean is conventionally divided. [9] The following names describe five different areas of the ocean: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Antarctic/Southern, and Arctic.
The Ring of Fire (also known as the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Rim of Fire, the Girdle of Fire or the Circum-Pacific belt) [note 1] is a tectonic belt of volcanoes and earthquakes . It is about 40,000 km (25,000 mi) long [1] and up to about 500 km (310 mi) wide, [2] and surrounds most of the Pacific Ocean . The Ring of Fire contains between 750 ...
The Polynesian Triangle is a geographical region of the Pacific Ocean with Hawaii ( Hawaiʻi) (1), New Zealand ( Aotearoa) (2) and Easter Island ( Rapa Nui) (3) at its corners, but excluding Fiji on its western side. At the center is Tahiti (5), with Samoa (4) to the west. The Polynesian Triangle is a region of the Pacific Ocean with three ...
The Pacific Plate is an oceanic tectonic plate that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. At 103 million km 2 (40 million sq mi), it is the largest tectonic plate. [ 2] The plate first came into existence as a microplate 190 million years ago, at the triple junction between the Farallon, Phoenix, and Izanagi Plates.