It is almost twice the size of the Atlantic Ocean, the second largest ocean. The Pacific Ocean is also the deepest ocean, around 2200 m more than the height of Mt. Everest. It was christened by the well known explorer Ferdinand Magellan and the name can be literally translated to mean ‘peaceful’. The southern part of the Ocean is called South Sea.

Extents, Islands and Ocean floor

The Pacific Ocean stretches from the Arctic region in the Northern Hemisphere to the Antarctic region in the Southern Hemisphere, from the Americas on the east to Asia and Australia on the west. . Its maximum length is 14,500 km, and its greatest width 17,700 km. Two of the largest rivers that drain into the Pacific Ocean are the Columbia of North America and the Huang He and Chang (Yangtze) of China.

Along the eastern shore of the Pacific, the coast rises unexpectedly from a deep sea-floor to high mountains on land, and there is a narrow continental shelf. On the other side, the coast is low and cavernous and is edged with islands rising from a wide continental shelf. Some of the important ones are the islands that make up Japan, the Malay Archipelago, and the islands of North America and South America. A ring of volcanoes called the ‘Ring of Fire’ borders the Pacific basin.

The average depth of the floor of Pacific Ocean is 4,300 m; essentially, it is a deep-sea plain. Its greatest known depth, 10,911.5 m, is in the Challenger Deep in the Marianas trench.

Some facts

• The Ocean covers 32% of the Earth’s surface and 46% of the surface of all oceans and seas.
• It is about 15 times the size of the US and its area is larger than the total land area of the world.
• The Pacific is the oldest of the existing ocean basins, its oldest rocks having been dated at 200 million years.
• The Pacific Ocean contains more than 30,000 islands; their total land area, however, amounts to only 1/4th of one percent of the ocean’s surface area.