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1851 map of Pacific listing colonial names of individual islands. Since the beginning of the 19th century, Australia and the islands of the Pacific have been grouped by geographers into a region called Oceania. [17] [18] It is often used as a quasi-continent, with the Pacific Ocean being the defining characteristic. [19]
World map of the five-ocean model with approximate boundaries. This list of countries which border two or more oceans includes both sovereign states and dependencies, provided the same contiguous territory borders on more than one of the five named oceans, the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, and Arctic. [1]
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The 3rd edition, currently in force, of the International Hydrographic Organization's (IHO) Limits of Oceans and Seas defines the limits of the South Pacific Ocean (excluding the seas it contains) as follows: [9] On the West. From Southeast Cape, the Southern point of Tasmania, down the meridian of 146°55'E to the Antarctic continent.
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.
It is considered to be a separate tectonic plate to the neighboring South American Plate, and contains several oceanic islands of the South Pacific, which have been associated with both Oceania and South America. The Galápagos Islands and Malpelo Island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean are possessions of Ecuador and Colombia, respectively ...
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."
The South Pacific Forum was founded in 1971, which became the Pacific Islands Forum in 2000. Bougainville Island , geographically part of the Solomon Islands archipelago but politically part of Papua New Guinea , tried unsuccessfully to become independent in 1975, and a civil war followed in the early 1990s, with it later being granted autonomy.