Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean and covers one third of the surface of the entire world. The body of water is between Asia and Australia in the west, the Americas in the east, the Southern Ocean to the south, and the Arctic Ocean to the north. It joins the Atlantic Ocean at a line drawn south from Cape Horn, in Chile andArgentina, to Antarctica, and it joins the Indian Ocean at a line drawn south from Tasmania, in Australia, to Antarctica.

Earth's oceans (World Ocean)
Atlantic Ocean Arctic Ocean Indian Ocean Pacific Ocean Southern Ocean

A map of the Pacific Ocean, which is ringed by many volcanoes and oceanic trenches.

As the Atlantic is slowly getting wider, the Pacific is slowly shrinking by folding the sea floor towards the centre of the Earth in what is called subduction. The bumping and grinding is so hard that there are many earthquakes and volcanoes when the pressure builds up and is quickly released as large explosions of hot rocks and dust. When an earthquake happens under the sea, the quick jerk causes a tsunami. That makes tsunamis more more common around the edge of the Pacific than anywhere else in the world. Many of the Earth's volcanoes are islands in the Pacific or on continents within a few hundred kilometers of the ocean's edge. Plate tectonics is another reason for the Pacific to be shrinking.

Other websites

• EPIC Pacific Ocean Data Collection Viewable on-line collection of observational data
• NOAA In-situ Ocean Data Viewer Archived 2006-02-11 at the Wayback Machine plot and download ocean observations
• NOAA PMEL Argo profiling floats Realtime Pacific Ocean data
• NOAA TAO El Niño data Realtime Pacific Ocean El Niño buoy data
• NOAA Ocean Surface Current Analyses – Realtime (OSCAR) Near-realtime Pacific Ocean Surface Currents derived from satellite altimeter and scatterometer data