• The Pacific Ocean takes up 30% of the surface of Earth, and accounts for 46% of the total water surface. It is twice as big and has twice as much water as the Atlantic. Half of all the world’s oceanic water is in the Pacific.
• It stretches more than halfway around the world. There are places where, if you went to the bottom of the Pacific and drilled a hole straight down, you’d come out on the other side of the world and still be in the Pacific Ocean. You could fit all seven continents in the Pacific and still have room left over. It’s larger than the surface area of Mars.
• The widest stretch spans the globe from Indonesia to the coast of South America, a distance of over 12,300 miles (19,800 km).
• The deepest part of the Pacific, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, is over 36,000 feet deep (11,000 m). There are other canyons that are nearly as deep. The average depth of the entire ocean is 13,000 feet (4,000 m).
• There are over 25,000 islands spread out over the Pacific Ocean. Beginning about 3,000 B.C., the Polynesian people, starting from Taiwan, found nearly all of these 25,000 islands using nothing but canoes with sails, expanding into what are now Indonesia, Madagascar, and the Philippines.
• About a third of the islands are inhabitable. Most are south of the Equator. Indonesia is the world’s largest island state, composed of a large cluster of more than 17,500 islands.
• New Guinea is the Pacific Ocean’s largest island, and is the second-largest island in the world, after Greenland in the North Atlantic.
• Easter Island is the most remote inhabited island in the world, over 1,243 miles away (2,000 km) from the nearest other piece of land, which is Pitcairn Island, and 2,175 miles away (3,500 km) from the west coast of South America.
• The Pacific is rimmed by the Ring of Fire where tectonic plates meet. 90% of all earthquakes and 75% of the planet’s volcanoes, amounting to over 450 of them, are found along the Ring of Fire.
• Due to movement of the tectonic plates, the Pacific Ocean is shrinking. Three tectonic plates squeeze inward by about an inch per year (2.5 cm), meaning the Pacific Ocean grows smaller by about a fifth of a square mile annually (.52 sq km). Meanwhile, the Atlantic Ocean expands in size at exactly the same rate.
• In 1507, German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller was the first to illustrate that North and South America sat between two oceans.
• In 1512, Portuguese explorers Antonio de Abreu and Francisco Serrao traversed the Pacific as far as Indonesia.
• In 1513, Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa sailed the Atlantic, hacked his way across Panama, and waded knee-deep into the Pacific, naming it “Mal del Sur” (“south sea”) and claiming the entire ocean for Spain.
• Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his Spanish crew were the first Europeans to cross the Pacific Ocean during their circumnavigation of the globe, and Magellan named it the Pacific (“peaceful”) Ocean in 1521.
• It wasn’t until 1529 that the true size of the Pacific was represented, by Portuguese mapmaker Diogo Ribero. Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius drew the first relatively accurate map of the Pacific Ocean in 1589.
• Today, there are technologies that allow us to map the floor of the Pacific Ocean. However, only around 13.8% of the Pacific Ocean floor has been mapped.