Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (or VOC) was a major force behind the Golden Age of Dutch exploration (category; c. 1590s–1720s) and Netherlandish cartography (c. 1570s–1670s). In the 17th century, the VOC's navigators and explorers charted almost three-quarters of the Australian coastline, except the east coast.
Anthropologists have defined Oceania as that region of the Pacific Ocean that encompasses three distinct geographical areas—Polynesia, meaning "many islands"; Micronesia, meaning "small islands"; and Melanesia, meaning "black islands." Other definitions of Oceania are used by geographers, economists, and oceanographers.
Polynesian navigators thus employed a wide range of techniques including the use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the patterns of bioluminescence that indicated the direction in which islands were located, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the ...
Archaeological evidence indicates that humans arrived on New Guinea at least 60,000 years ago, probably by sea from Southeast Asia during an ice age period when the sea was lower and distances between islands shorter. For an overview of the geological history of the continent of which New Guinea is a part, see Australia – New Guinea.
In 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and encountered the Pacific Ocean, calling it the South Sea. In 1521, a Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan was the first recorded crossing of the Pacific Ocean, Magellan then naming it the "peaceful sea."
Oceania is geologically the youngest realm. While other realms include old continental land masses or fragments of continents, Oceania is composed mostly of volcanic high islands and coral atolls that arose from the sea in geologically recent times, many of them in the Pleistocene .
The Austronesian peoples, who include the people of Micronesia, developed oceangoing sailing technologies to migrate across the Pacific Ocean.. Micronesian navigation techniques are those navigation skills used for thousands of years by the navigators who voyaged between the thousands of small islands in the western Pacific Ocean in the subregion of Oceania, that is commonly known as Micronesia.
Oceania is a geographical, and geopolitical, region consisting of numerous lands—mostly islands in the Pacific Ocean and vicinity. The term is also sometimes used to denote a continent comprising Australia and proximate Pacific islands. [1][2][3][4] The boundaries of Oceania are defined in a number of ways.