The largest ocean basin is the Pacific, followed by the Atlantic, Indian, Southern and Arctic. (Image credit: FrankRamspott via Getty Images)
The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on the planet, and is more than five times wider than our Moon. But what makes the Pacific Ocean so huge?
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Pacific Ocean covers about 63 million square miles (163 million square kilometers) — more than 30 percent of the Earth’s entire surface area — and all of the continents could fit within its waters. The Pacific Ocean, which contains more than half of the Earth’s fresh water, is also the planet’s deepest body of water, reaching depths of more than 36,000 feet (11,000 meters) at the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, NOAA notes.
The predecessor of the Pacific Ocean was Panthalassa, or the Panthalassa Ocean, which was once the only ocean on Earth. This global superocean existed at a time when all of Earth's continents were united into the supercontinent Pangea.
You may like
- Giant 'mud waves' found deep in the ocean reveal the dramatic formation of the Atlantic as Africa and South America finally split apart.
- Earth's oceans were once green but could turn purple in the future, scientists say
- Only 0.001% of the ocean depths have ever been explored by humans—an area equivalent to the size of Rhode Island.
“Panthalassa was the proto-Pacific,” Suzanne Noyer, founding director of the School for Oceanic Futures at Arizona State University in Tempe, told Live Science. “Basically, the Pacific Ocean is what’s left of Panthalassa.”
Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Life's Little Secrets, to stay up to date with the latest news before it hits the web.
Oceans and continents, past and present, sit on tectonic plates, huge blocks of rock that form the Earth’s rigid outer shell. These plates move regularly, sometimes colliding with each other and sometimes pulling apart. About 230 million years ago, these movements led to the breakup of Pangea.
“The parts that became North America and Eurasia began to separate from what became South America, Africa, Antarctica, and Australia,” Adriana Lam, an associate professor of earth sciences at Binghamton University in New York, told Live Science.
Eventually, Pangea split apart. The Atlantic Ocean formed in the gap between the continents. “The Atlantic is growing at about two to three centimeters a year, or about an inch,” Noyer said. “That may not sound like much, but when you multiply that over millions of years, it’s quite a lot.”
Sourse: www.livescience.com
