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What do you know about the Pacific Ocean?
How big is the Pacific Ocean?
Where is the Pacific Ocean located?
Why is the Pacific Ocean so important?
- Over 1.1 billion years ago, there was a supercontinent called Rodinia that included the lands we now know as Australia, Antarctica, the Americas, South China, Greenland, Siberia, and West Africa.
- Land masses and oceans shift continuously because of plate tectonics. According to scientists, the Pacific Ocean shrinks annually by 0.52 square kilometers.
- The Pacific Ocean is the world’s largest body of water. Its borders include the Arctic Ocean to the north and the continent of Antarctica to the south.
- In reality, all of the world’s oceans are connected with each section given its own name only for convenience. The Pacific Ocean is connected to the Indian Ocean via the Straits of Malacca in the west and to the Atlantic Ocean via the Straits of Magellan in the east.
- Overview
- Birthing hurricanes
- The Ring of Fire
- The Mariana Trench
- Ocean acidification and ‘the blob’
- Great Pacific Garbage Patch
- Overfishing
The largest ocean on Earth is filled with mysteries, but also subject to great pressures like climate change, plastic pollution, and overfishing.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest ocean on Earth. It spans 60 million square miles from California to China, and in certain regions extends tens of thousands of feet below the surface of the water.
To get a sense of just how immense the Pacific Ocean is, you could put all of Earth's landmasses together, and the Pacific would still be larger.
The name Pacific is a version of pacify or peaceful. It was named by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 as he sailed through a calm patch of water on the ocean. Despite its name, the Pacific is a vast body of water teeming with activity. Much of the ocean is still waiting to be explored, but human activities like industrial fishing, deep-sea mining, and fossil-fuel burning are already changing it in significant ways. The vast body of water is home to some of the most unique life forms on Earth and contains the deepest reaches known to humankind.
Here's a look at some key features of this great ocean, as well as issues affecting it.
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The Pacific Ocean stirs up some of the strongest hurricanes ever seen. For example, in 2018 the strongest storm of the year was Super Typhoon Mangkhut. It hit the Philippines in late September before dissipating over mainland China. At its strongest, the storm’s winds topped 165 miles per hour, uprooting trees, destroying homes, and causing deadly mudslides.
Hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones are actually different names for the same weather pattern. Hurricane is used in the eastern Pacific, typhoon in the northwestern Pacific, and cyclone in the southwestern Pacific. The storms feed on the energy of warm water, making the Pacific a powerful breeding ground for them.
The Pacific basin is called the “Ring of Fire” because of the area of earthquake and volcanic activity around its edges. The resulting chain of volcanoes is roughly 25,000 miles long and springs to life where the Pacific tectonic plate slides against or collides into the other tectonic plates that circle it. The subduction of tectonic plates—when a plate slides beneath another one—in certain areas also helps form deepwater trenches.
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The Mariana Trench is one such deep ocean trench that sits along the Ring of Fire in the Mariana Archipelago east of the Philippines. It's the deepest known spot on the planet—deeper than Mt. Everest is tall, reaching down roughly seven miles. The deepest point in the trench is called Challenger Deep, at 36,000 feet down.
Humans descended into the Challenger Deep in 1960 inside a U.S. Navy submersible, and film director and explorer James Cameron made a solo trip in 2012. Today, scientists periodically send remotely operated vehicles to the bottom of the trench for various research purposes.
Burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide into the air doesn't just alter the makeup of our atmosphere. Oceans, which absorb about 30 percent of the CO2 released into the atmosphere, are also highly susceptible to the changes taking place in a warming world. When that carbon is absorbed, a series of chemical reactions takes place that produces more hydrogen ions and leads to more acidic waters. According to NOAA, the ocean's pH has dropped by 0.1 pH units in the past 200 years. That equates to ocean waters that are 30 percent more acidic. More acidic water is making it harder for organisms that make shells out of calcium carbonate, like clams and corals, to survive.
From 2014 to 2016, a warm weather anomaly often referred to as the blob was responsible for killing off high percentages of marine life in the Pacific. On the U.S. West Coast, many marine mammals like sea lions and otters were turning up dead. Some scientists have since speculated that the Pacific blob was a sign of what life may be like in a warming world.
Between Hawaii and California is an area larger than the state of Texas that has been dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Though the name may conjure up a massive island of plastic jutting out of the sea, 94 percent of the plastics found in the patch are actually microplastics—tiny pieces of plastic smaller than a grain of rice and often impossible to see with the naked eye. Much of the heaviest plastic found in the patch is abandoned fishing gear, often referred to as “ghost nets.” Ghost nets threaten marine life because they can easily ensnare animals swimming by.
The garbage patch in the Pacific is the largest known on the planet, but several others can be found in other oceans (five main ones are often reported). Debris tends to collect in swirling, circular currents called gyres.
Billions of people around the world rely on fish as their primary source of protein and millions rely on it for their livelihood. Many of the world's populations of wild fish harvested for humans to eat are now overfished, or over exploited beyond what the fish can replace through reproduction. The precise number is often debated by conservationists but the United Nations has estimated about a third of global fisheries are overfished. Whether a mile off a country's coast or far out to sea, overfishing affects much of the Pacific Ocean, although there have been encouraging signs that some fisheries are recovering.
Successful fisheries managers monitor the health of their stocks regularly to dictate when a region can be fished, how much, and when “no-take zones” should be created to allow a population more time to reproduce and multiply.
1 day 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 and South America on the east. Its area, excluding adjacent seas, encompasses about 62.5 million square miles.
- The Pacific Ocean was named by Ferdinand Magellan. Explorer Ferdinand Magellan was the first European to sail through the dangerous straits to South America in the 16th century.
- The Pacific Ocean is shrinking. The ocean is shrinking around one inch every year. This is due to the effects of plate tectonics under the water. It’s occurring around three sides of the basin, while at the same time, the Atlantic Ocean is growing by the same amount every year.
- The first European to discover the Pacific Ocean was Vasco Núñez de Balboa. Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and entered the Pacific Ocean in 1513, meaning he was the first European to see sail within it.
- The deepest point in the Pacific Ocean is in the Mariana Trench. The Mariana Trench is located in the western Pacific, east of the Philippines, and around 124 miles east of the Mariana Islands.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of the 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.
- 4,280 m (14,040 ft)
- 165,250,000 km² (63,800,000 sq mi)
- 10,911 m (35,797 ft)
- 710,000,000 km³ (170,000,000 cu mi)
Notable Oceanographic Features. The Pacific Ocean is characterized by several significant oceanographic features, including: The Mariana Trench: the deepest part of the ocean, reaching depths of more than 36,000 feet (10,972 meters) The Great Barrier Reef: the world’s largest coral reef system, located off the coast of Australia.
4 days ago · The Pacific Ocean from space. 3. The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest ocean in the world. It stretches for over 60 million square miles (155 million square kilometers) and covers more than 30 percent of the Earth’s surface. 4. It covers more of the Earth’s surface than all the dry land put together.
