Australasian Mediterranean Sea – 9.080 million km 2 (includes other seas).Largest seas in the Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean, photograph taken from space by the GOES-18 spacecraft in September 2023 He called it Mar Pacífico, which in Spanish and Portuguese means ' peaceful sea'. Afterwards, the ocean's current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish circumnavigation of the world in 1521, as he encountered favorable winds on reaching the ocean. In the early 16th century, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and sighted the great "Southern Sea" which he named Mar del Sur (in Spanish). The western Pacific has many major marginal seas, including the Philippine Sea, South China Sea, East China Sea, Sea of Japan, Sea of Okhotsk, Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, Mar de Grau, Tasman Sea, and the Coral Sea. The third deepest point on Earth, the Sirena Deep, is also located in the Mariana Trench. The Pacific also contains the deepest point in the Southern Hemisphere, the Horizon Deep in the Tonga Trench, at 10,823 meters (35,509 feet). Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, located in the northwestern Pacific, is the deepest known point in the world, reaching a depth of 10,928 meters (35,853 feet). The Pacific Ocean's mean depth is 4,000 meters (13,000 feet). The Pacific Ocean can also be informally divided by the International Date Line into the East Pacific and the West Pacific, which allows it to be further divided into four quadrants, namely the Northeast Pacific off the coasts of North America, the Southeast Pacific off South America, Northwest Pacific off Far Eastern Asia, and the Southwest Pacific around Oceania. Ocean circulation (caused by the Coriolis effect) subdivides it into two largely independent volumes of water that meet at the equator, the North Pacific Ocean and the South Pacific Ocean (or more loosely the South Seas). The centers of both the Water Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere, as well as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, are in the Pacific Ocean. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continents of Asia and Oceania in the west and the Americas in the east.Īt 165,250,000 square kilometers (63,800,000 square miles) in area (as defined with a southern Antarctic border), this largest division of the World Ocean and the hydrosphere covers about 46% of Earth's water surface and about 32% of the planet's total surface area, larger than its entire land area (148,000,000 km 2 (57,000,000 sq mi)). The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions.
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