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The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions.It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continents of Asia and Australia in the west and the Americas in the east.
Between the end of the 15th century and the 20th century, colonial powers from Europe dispatched explorers to discover a commercial sea route north and west around North America. The Northwest Passage represented a new route to the established trading nations of Asia. England called the hypothetical northern route the "Northwest Passage".
The Pacific is ringed by many volcanoes and oceanic trenches. The Pacific Ocean evolved in the Mesozoic from the Panthalassic Ocean, which had formed when Rodinia rifted apart around 750 Ma. The first ocean floor which is part of the current Pacific plate began 160 Ma to the west of the central Pacific and subsequently developed into the ...
The pelagic (water column) environment of the continental shelf constitutes the neritic zone, and the benthic (sea floor) province of the shelf is the sublittoral zone. [35] The shelves make up less than 10% of the ocean, and a rough estimate suggests that only about 30% of the continental shelf sea floor receives enough sunlight to allow ...
The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. [8] In English, the term ocean also refers to any of the large bodies of water into which the world ocean is conventionally divided. [9] The following names describe five different areas of the ocean: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Antarctic/Southern, and Arctic.
Area covered by the Indo-Pacific biogeographic region Indo-Pacific. The green circle covers ASEAN.. The Indo-Pacific is a vast biogeographic region of Earth.In a narrow sense, sometimes known as the Indo-West Pacific or Indo-Pacific Asia, it comprises the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean, the western and central Pacific Ocean, and the seas connecting the two.
The western portion of the plate is occupied by Central America. The Cocos plate in the Pacific Ocean is subducted beneath the Caribbean plate, just off the western coast of Central America. This subduction forms the volcanoes of Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, also known as the Central America Volcanic Arc.
The oceanic zone is typically defined as the area of the ocean lying beyond the continental shelf (e.g. the neritic zone), but operationally is often referred to as beginning where the water depths drop to below 200 metres (660 ft), seaward from the coast into the open ocean with its pelagic zone.