A million islands’ rumor became a 300,000-square-kilometre Pacific triangle
Polynesia scatters more than a thousand islands across the mid- and south Pacific, yet solid ground totals only about 300,000 to 310,000 square kilometres—over 270,000 of that in New Zealand alone. Charles de Brosses coined Polynésie in 1756; Dumont d’Urville narrowed it in 1831.
Geographers usually draw the Polynesian Triangle with corners at Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, enclosing Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Niue, the Cook Islands, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, and French Polynesia. Outlying Polynesian communities also live in Vanuatu, the Solomons, Papua New Guinea and the Carolines, and Rotuma north of Fiji shares Polynesian customs while speaking an unrelated language. Polynesians once lived on the Kermadecs, Norfolk Island and the Aucklands, but those islands were empty by the time Europeans came. The Line and Phoenix groups, mostly in Kiribati, had no permanent residents before colonial times yet are often counted inside the triangle. Some Lau islands southeast of Fiji keep deep historic ties with Tonga.
Hotspot volcanoes built Hawaii, Samoa, and most archipelagos; New Zealand, Norfolk, and Ouvéa ride different geology, including Zealandia’s mostly drowned continent that sank about 23 million years ago and partly resurfaced with plate shifts. Zealandia’s continental shelf spans about 3.6 million square kilometres. New Zealand holds the region’s oldest rocks, some 510 million years old, while the oldest elsewhere, in the Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain, reach about 80 million. The Kermadec–Tonga trench and Alpine Fault scribble fire and shake onto the map.
Islanders across the triangle share related languages, customs and traditional beliefs. Early European labels once draped “Polynesia” over the whole Pacific before scholars carved Melanesia and Micronesia beside it. Southern islands were long called the South Sea Islands, a label awkwardly stretched to include Hawaii in the North Pacific. Islands east of Easter Island, such as the Galápagos, Clipperton and Juan Fernández, were occasionally lumped in, though no trace of prehistoric Polynesian contact has turned up there.
Source: Polynesia
