Ocean
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest ocean on Earth. It is so huge that all the continents together would fit into it, and its deepest point is the deepest place on Earth.
Picture credit: Diferoch (CC BY-SA 4.0) · micah420 (CC BY 2.0) · LentedeBerilo (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Pacific Ocean?
Continents on its shores: Asia, Oceania, North America, South America.
The story behind it
The Pacific stretches from the icy Arctic in the north to Antarctica in the south, with Asia and Australia on one side and the Americas on the other. In 1520 the sailor Ferdinand Magellan found its water so calm that he called it “Mar Pacífico”, the peaceful sea. But it is not always peaceful: around its edges lies the Ring of Fire, with several hundred active volcanoes and many earthquakes. About 25 000 islands rise from the Pacific, grouped into Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. Off the north-east coast of Australia lies the Great Barrier Reef, a giant coral reef. In the Mariana Trench is the Challenger Deep, the deepest place on Earth. In 1960 two explorers, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, dived all the way down in a special craft called the Trieste and stayed on the bottom for about twenty minutes.
Find it on the globe
Pacific Ocean is there as a name written across its water — tap the water and its card opens. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
Questions children ask
How big is the Pacific Ocean?
The Pacific covers about 165 million km², about a third of the whole surface of the Earth. Sources give slightly different numbers, because they draw its borders in different places.
How deep is the Pacific Ocean?
On average it is about 4 280 m deep. At the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench it reaches about 10 935 m, the deepest spot on the planet.
Why is it called the Pacific?
In 1520 Ferdinand Magellan sailed into calm water after many storms and named it “Mar Pacífico”, the peaceful sea. The name stuck, even though the Pacific also has strong storms.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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