Everyone knows that the Pacific Ocean is the largest body of water on the Earth, but just how big is it? The precise answer is that the Pacific Ocean’s surface area is 165,250,000 square kilometers (or for readers in Burma, Liberia, and the US, 63,800,000 square miles). That’s just short of half (46%) of the world’s water area and a third (32.6%) of the planet’s total surface area. With an average depth of 3,970 meters (13,025 feet) it contains 669,880,000 cubic kilometers of water. That’s just over half (50.1%) of the ocean water. I leave the conversion of the volume to English units to those readers in the aforementioned countries (answer below).
The Pacific Ocean is so large that all of the world’s continents and major islands would fit comfortably within its area. Which leads us to our featured map of the week courtesy of Chris Stephens, from naturalearthdata.com.
Discovery
Vasco Núñez de Balboa is credited as the “discoverer” of the great ocean where millions of people had been living, traveling, trading, and fishing for thousands of years. Most people accept Balboa’s discovery as meaning the first European to visit the Pacific Ocean. Sadly, even that’s not entirely true. As we learned in an earlier Map Monday post, Marco Polo’s journeys included sailing in the western Pacific in the late thirteenth century. Excluding Polo and the other “over land” traders several Portuguese navigators also reached the western Pacific before Balboa. That said, Balboa did lead the first European expedition to “discover” the eastern edge of the Pacific.
On 25 September 1513 Balboa crested a summit in Panama and glimpsed the waters of the eastern Pacific. Balboa split his team into three groups to search for a path to the coast. Two days later a group led by Alonso Martin, found a way to the sea. Martin returned to Balboa, who with the rest of the men marched to the coast. On 29 September 1513 Balboa famously marched knee-deep into the sea and claiming it for Spain named it the Southern Sea (Mar del Sur).
Renaming
So why do we call it the Pacific Ocean if its acknowledged discoverer named it something else? Balboa named it based on his traveling south across the Panamanian isthmus to reach the coast. Given that half of the vast ocean lies north of the equator (indeed Balboa’s discovery reached it in the northern hemisphere), his name was found wanting. It was the Portuguese born Ferdinand Magellan, also sailing for Spain, who gave the ocean its current moniker. After passing around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, through the straits that bear his name, Magellan came to much calmer open waters. He named the ocean Pacific or “peaceful” in honor of the newly tranquil sea.
As always thanks for reading.
Armen
Answer for metrically challenged readers: 160,712,759 cubic miles of water