Earth’s biggest ocean covers nearly a third of the planet
Defined with an Antarctic southern border, the Pacific spans about 165 million square kilometres—roughly forty-six percent of Earth’s water surface and thirty-two percent of the whole globe, larger than all land combined. Mean depth is about 4,000 metres, and Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench plunges to 10,928 metres.
Stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Southern Ocean, or to Antarctica itself under some definitions, the Pacific is bounded by Asia and Australia on one side and the Americas on the other. Horizon Deep in the Tonga Trench holds the Southern Hemisphere depth record at 10,823 metres, and Sirena Deep ranks third worldwide. Marginal seas ring the rim, from the Philippine and China seas through Okhotsk, Bering, Alaska, California, Tasman, and Coral waters. Point Nemo, near 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W, is the most remote oceanic spot on Earth.
Balboa in 1513 named the water Mar del Sur; Magellan in 1520 coined Mar Pacífico for the calm winds his Spanish circumnavigation met. More than 25,000 islands rise across the basin, many of them long-dormant volcanic shells linked to the Ring of Fire, while near the equator ring-shaped coral atolls enclose central lagoons above old seamounts.
Modern humans reached the western Pacific some 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, crossing at least eighty kilometres of open water from Sunda to Sahul; their descendants include Negritos, Melanesians and Indigenous Australians. Austronesian expansion from Taiwan around 3000 to 1500 BCE carried outriggers, catamarans, and crab-claw sails, and newcomers intermarried with earlier peoples across Island Southeast Asia.
A Lapita branch reached the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji and New Caledonia around 1300 to 1200 BCE, then Tonga and Samoa by roughly 900 to 800 BCE. After a long pause, voyagers had reached Tahiti, the Cook Islands and the Marquesas by 700 CE, then Hawaiʻi around 900, Rapa Nui by 1000, and New Zealand by 1200. Whether they also touched the Americas remains unproven.
Source: Pacific Ocean
