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What is the meaning behind the name Pacific Ocean? The name Pacific Ocean comes from the Latin word “pacificus,” which means peaceful. It was named this because the ocean was first seen by European explorers during a calm period, and they thought it was a peaceful body of water.
Oct 18, 2023 · Explorer Ferdinand Magellan named the Pacific Ocean in the 16th century. Covering approximately 155 million square kilometers (59 million square miles) and containing more than half of the free water on Earth, the Pacific is by far the largest of the world's ocean basins. In 1519, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, in the employ of Spain ...
Marginal seas. v. t. e. 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.
First printed map devoted to the Pacific Ocean. Engraved in (and dated) 1589, this map initially appeared in the 1590 Additamentum to Ortelius’s famous atlas, the first collection of uniformly sized maps. The exhibited copy comes from the 1595 Latin edition of the atlas, but the map is unchanged.
- ARCTIC. Most bodies of water are named for the areas they surround or the areas that surround them. For example, the Arctic Ocean was named because of its location in the Arctic Circle—which begs the question, how did the Arctic Circle get its name?
- ATLANTIC. The first documented usage of the term “Atlantic” was in the sixth century BC by a Greek poet, Atlantikôi pelágei or the “Sea of Atlas.” In Greek mythology, Atlas is the Titan tasked with holding up the heavens for all eternity.
- INDIAN. The Indian Ocean has been known as such since at least 1515 and is another example of an ocean being named by the area that surrounds it. Earlier accounts named it the Eastern Ocean and Ancient Greece referred to the northwestern Indian ocean as the Erythraean Sea or the Red Sea, likely referring to seasonal blooms of cyanobacteria near the water’s surface turning the normal green-blue water a reddish brown.
- PACIFIC. The Pacific Ocean or Mare Pacificum, meaning “peaceful sea,” was dubbed so by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 after his treacherous journey to find the “Spice Islands”, now known as the Malaku Islands in eastern Indonesia.
Aug 7, 2020 · Article. Polynesian navigation of the Pacific Ocean and its settlement began thousands of years ago. The inhabitants of the Pacific islands had been voyaging across vast expanses of ocean water sailing in double canoes or outriggers using nothing more than their knowledge of the stars and observations of sea and wind patterns to guide them.
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3 days ago · Pacific Ocean, body of salt water extending from the 60° S parallel in the south to the Arctic in the north and lying between the continents of Asia and Australia on the west and North America and South America on the east. Of the three major oceans, the Pacific is by far the largest, occupying about one-third of the surface of the globe.
