Home > Pacific Ocean
:For other meanings of pacific, see pacific (disambiguation).
The Pacific Ocean (from the Spanish Pacífico, meaning peaceful) is the world's largest body of water. It encompasses a third of the Earth's surface, having an area of 179.7 million km² (69.4 million sq mi). Extending approximately 15,500 km (9,600 mi) from the Bering Sea in the Arctic to the icy margins of Antarctica's Ross Sea in the south, the Pacific reaches its greatest east-west width at about 5 deg N latitude, where it stretches approximately 19,800 km (12,300 mi) from Indonesia to the coast of Colombia. The western limit of the ocean is often placed at the Strait of Malacca. The lowest point on the earth's surface—the Mariana Trench—lies within the Pacific.
Pacific Ocean seen from Coast of central Chile.
The Pacific contains about 25,000 islands (more than the total number in the rest of the world's oceans combined), the majority of which are found south of the equator. (See: Pacific IslandsThe Pacific Ocean has an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 islands; the exact number is unknown. These islands are also sometimes collectively called Oceania and are traditionally grouped into three: (1) Melanesia, (2) Micronesia, and (3) Polynesia. Melanesia me.)
Along the Pacific Ocean's irregular margins lie many seas, the largest of which are the Celebes SeaMaitum,_Sarangani The Celebes Sea of the western Pacific Ocean, bordered on the north by the Sulu Archipelago and Sulu Sea and Mindanao Island of the Philippines, on the east by the Sangi Islands chain, on the south by Sulawesi, and on the west by Borneo., Coral SeaThe Coral Sea is a region off the north-east coast of Australia with a namesake chain of islands (uninhabited), including the Willis, Coringa, and Tregosse Islets. The Coral Sea is named for its primary feature, the Great Barrier Reef, which is the larges, East China SeaThe East China Sea (Chinese: Dong Hi , literal meaning: East Sea is a marginal sea and part of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by Mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Its surface area is around 1,200,000 km². In South Korea, the sea is sometimes c, Sea of JapanThe Sea of Japan (in South Korea called East Sea, in China called Japan Sea) is a marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean, bound by the Japanese islands of Hokkaido, Honshu and Kyushu and Sakhalin island to the east, and the Korean peninsula and Russia, South China SeaThe South China Sea is a marginal sea, part of the Pacific Ocean, encompassing an area from Singapore to the Strait of Taiwan of around 3,500,000 km². The minute South China Sea Islands, collectively an archipelago, number in the hundreds. A number of nat, Sulu SeaThe Sulu Sea is a large sea in the southwestern area of the Philippines. It is separated from the South China Sea in the northeast by Palawan, and from the Celebes Sea in the southeast by the Sulu Archipelago. Borneo is found to the southwest and Visayas, Tasman SeaThe Tasman Sea is the large body of water between Australia and New Zealand and is a south-western segment of the South Pacific Ocean. The sea was named after the Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman, discoverer of New Zealand and Tasmania. The British exp and Yellow Sea. The Straits of Malacca joins the Pacific and the Indian oceans on the west, and the Straits of Magellan links the Pacific with the Atlantic Ocean on the east.
The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan named the ocean. For most of his voyage from the Straits of Magellan to the Philippines, Magellan indeed found the ocean peaceful. However, the Pacific is not always peaceful. Many typhoons and hurricanes batter the islands of the Pacific and the lands around the Pacific rim are full of volcanoes and often rocked by earthquakes. Tsunamis, caused by underwater earthquakes, have devastated many islands and wiped out whole towns.
