Fact 2: The Pacific Ocean has been known to humans since ancient times, and it is often referred to as the Great Ocean in the old chronicles of various nations. Yet it covers the shores of only 43 countries, while the Atlantic Ocean touches land in almost a hundred countries.

Fact 3: The Pacific Ocean accounts for more than 50% of all the water in the world. This refers to all the liquid water on Earth, but the practical eternal ice of Antarctica does not count here, as well as the snow caps with glaciers high in the mountains. In Antarctica, by the way, the volume of ice is about half the volume of water in the Pacific Ocean.

Fact 4: There are about 25,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean. No one has so far bothered to calculate precisely, because it is a complicated process, especially if you count as an island every rock that sticks out above the surface of the water. But in any case, it is more than the number of islands in all the other oceans combined.

Fact 5: The variety of life in the Pacific Ocean waters and on the ocean floor is beyond imagination. There are already over 100,000 known species, from plankton to mammals, and surely that’s not all. New species, especially those living at great depths and therefore eluding researchers, are still being discovered from time to time. By the way, the number of salmon fish alone here is incredible – about 95% of the world’s population. And there are more than 1000 different species of crayfish.

Fact 6: The Pacific Ocean takes up about one-third of the earth’s surface and represents 46% of all the water surface of our planet. And to make it sound even more impressive, let’s add that the width between its shores at the widest point reaches 19,800 km.

Fact 7: Currents have created the Great Pacific garbage patch, a gigantic pile of trash, which according to some estimates is 1,500,000 square kilometers in size. That’s about five times the size of Italy. It seems like it’s really time for us to think about what we’re doing to our planet.

Fact 8: The navigator Fernand Magellan crossed the Pacific Ocean in 3 months and 20 days, and he was lucky with the weather – he did not encounter a single storm, and therefore decided to call the ocean the Pacific Ocean. The name had time to catch on before it became clear that hurricanes occur over it more often than any other.

Fact 9. The Pacific Ocean is home to a junction of tectonic plates, creating the Pacific Ring of Fire-where plates collide, dozens of volcanoes rise. There are also frequent destructive earthquakes, which often cause enormous tsunamis, during which killer waves cross the ocean at a speed of 600-800 kilometers per hour. Up to 90% of all earthquakes on the planet occur in the ocean.

Fact 10: The Pacific Ocean could contain all of the states that exist on Earth, and there would still be room. Because it is larger than the total land area of the entire earth, including Antarctica and all the islands, by about 30,000,000 square kilometers.

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Typically, new oceans are born when continents break apart and hot magma pours out of the rifts, solidifying and turning into oceanic crust. This is how the Atlantic Ocean was born, when, in the Mesozoic era, the supercontinent Pangaea split into the southern continent of Gondwana and the northern continent of Eurasia. Conversely, the old oceans die at a time when the continents collide, and the oceanic crust sinks back into the mantle under their pressure. Thus, the aforementioned Tethys disappeared – Africa and India approached Eurasia, leaving absolutely no room for the water basin that previously separated these continents.

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Here are some curious facts:

• The volume of water in the ocean is the third largest in the world after the Pacific and Atlantic.
• In ancient times, the ocean was called the “Eastern Ocean,” later European discoverers and explorers renamed it.
• The first swims were made before our era.
• Covillan, Vasco da Gama, and Cook made significant contributions to the study of the sea region.
• In the depths of the ocean there are almost 2 billion tons of black gold and 2.3 trillion tons of gas.
• Sometimes shining circles appear on the surface of the ocean. This is believed to be plankton in large quantities.
• It is in the Indian Ocean that the sea with the highest salt content on Earth – the Red Sea contains 42%.
• The ocean contains a huge variety of coral reefs of great length.

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