The Pacific Ocean Map is one of the largest oceans. This Pacific Ocean Map will help you know and understand the location and importance of this ocean to the world. The Pacific ocean map is from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the southern Ocean in the South. The western coast of South America, east Australia, South East Asia, and the West Coast of the United States are the border of the Pacific Ocean map. The printable world map will show you more.
Table of Contents
World with the Pacific Ocean Map
World Map with Pacific Ocean pdf
Free Printable World Map with the Pacific Ocean
Black and White World Map with Pacific Oceans
About the Pacific
The Floor of the Pacific Ocean
The Ring of Fire
The Pacific Climate
World with the Pacific Ocean Map
The name Pacific comes from the Latin word Pace, which means peaceful; Ferdinand Magellan, in 1521, gave it the name “mar pacifico”, i.e., calm sea. Bali, Bering, Bering Strait, Coral, East China, Gulf of Alaska Sea, Gulf of Tonkin Sea, Philippine, Sea of Japan, Okhotsk, South China, and the Tasman Sea are the primary and essential seashores around the world. View and this download the Pacific Ocean Map here.
World Map with Pacific Ocean pdf
The Pacific Ocean map has 46% of the total earth’s surface water and is 165,250,000 square km in area. Also, it covers 28% of the total area of the landmass. The Pacific Ocean is also the deepest in the world, with the Mariana Trench as the deepest point. Plate tectonics shrinks the ocean by 0.5km2 per year as the plates move.
Free Printable World Map with the Pacific Ocean
The free printable World Map with the Pacific Ocean map shows that active water volcanoes are also located under the Pacific Ocean and are called the Ring of fire. Due to these active volcanoes, many earthquakes also happen in the area forming U shape from the southern tip of South America, the west coast of North America, and New Zealand. Tsunamis were also the result of this area’s destruction.
Black and White World Map with Pacific Oceans
The Pacific ocean consists of around 25000 islands, of which Indonesia has 17000 islands, and Japan has 3000. The White Shark Cafe is a location in Baja, California, where sharks hang out most, but still, the reason for their gathering is not known. This black and white World Map with the Pacific Ocean map will help you locate many other locations in the Pacific ocean map. You can get a hard copy of these maps by printing them and use multiple times after downloading them.
About the Pacific Ocean Map
The Pacific Ocean’s most notable attribute is its vast size: it is the world’s largest ocean, but it is also the world’s most significant single physical feature. With a surface area of 64 million square miles (166 million square kilometers), it is twice the size of the Atlantic Ocean and covers almost one-third of the Earth’s surface—more than all of the land areas combined.
The Pacific Ocean stretches from the Bering Sea, connected to the Arctic Ocean, to the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, from north to south. The Pacific Ocean’s largest dimension spans from east to west, covering about half of the Equator’s length. The ocean is 12,000 miles wide at its widest point.
The Pacific Ocean has the deepest known oceanic trenches and has the most significant average depth of any ocean. With a depth of about 36,000 feet (11,000 meters), the Mariana Trench is more profound than the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, which stands at 29,032 feet (8,849 meters).
The Floor of the Pacific Ocean
Plate tectonics and continental drift theories can explain many of the Pacific’s primary features, including its floor, islands, and coasts. The crust of the Earth is separated into thin, rigid plates that move. Oceanic ridges also comprise the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, a continuous chain of underwater mountains that runs through the world’s seas. Volcanic activity creates new crustal material along these ridges. The movement of the plates is caused by the addition of additional material, which pushes the plates apart.
The oceanic plates fall below the continental plates into Earth’s interior as they are pushed toward them by the mid-ocean ridges. Oceanic trenches are generated when they fall. These valleys are small, linear, deep and run parallel to the continental shores. These trenches are most common in the Pacific. The oceanic plates are destroyed as they descend into the tracks. No marine plate rock older than 200 million years has been discovered by drilling. As a result, oceanic crust is generated at the ridges and destroyed in the trenches in millions-year-long cycles.
The Pacific Plate covers the majority of the Pacific Ocean map. The little Cocos Plate is located off the coast of Central America, and the Nazca Plate is located west of South America. The Philippine Sea Plate lies east of the Philippine Islands, while the Eurasian Plate lies west of East Asia’s islands. The Pacific Ocean’s floor is separated into two distinct sections, covering nearly half of the ocean’s surface. The eastern part has few mountains and ridges and thus few islands, but the western half has plenty. Many cracks run parallel to each other in bands termed fracture zones that run parallel to each other—mostly at right angles to the part of the west, but not the eastern region.
The East Pacific Rise, a part of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, is located in the eastern Pacific ocean map. The East Pacific Rise runs roughly parallel to the South American coast but thousands of kilometers west. Several fracture zones traverse it. Near southwestern Mexico, it approaches North America. The most extended trenches are in the western Pacific, where there are ten trenches of various lengths, predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere. The Middle America Trench off Central America and the much longer Peru-Chile Trench are the only two in the eastern Pacific. The Indian Ocean, on the other hand, has only one trench, while the Atlantic has three short ones.
The basins, or plains, are the third major characteristic of the ocean floors. There isn’t much relief in them. The abyssal plains are the largest flat areas on Earth’s surface. Rises, continental shelves, and ridges define the plains. On the Pacific Plate, one categorization specifies nine basins and two abyssal plains.
Volcanoes are the most prominent relief features of ocean basins, with an estimated 20,000 on the world’s ocean floors. Some form isolated mountains, while others form ridges with other volcanoes. They rise above the water’s surface as islands, which frequently form linear groups like the Hawaiian Islands. The highest summits of hills form island clusters. The submerged portion of the Hawaiian Islands is one of the largest and longest of these volcanic ridges, stretching for almost 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers).
Many Pacific island groupings are linear in shape, with the most significant and highest island at one end and the smallest and lowest. The Hawaiian Islands have this trait, described as erratic plate movement over a hot point. From the hot topic, molten volcanic material is ejected. Suppose the plate pauses for a long enough period at the place and a massive mass of material forms. A volcanic island, or ridge, is formed in this manner. The plate shifts, and a section of it pass over the hotspot, receiving new volcanic material.
Meanwhile, if the older material has become an island, it is prone to erosion and so wears away. The Hawaiian Islands are an excellent example of this. The smallest, lowest, and oldest islands are in the northwest, while the largest, highest, and youngest island (Hawaii) is in the southeast. The oldest rocks in Hawaii are only approximately 700,000 years old, whereas the youngest is roughly 2 million years old on Oahu, about 140 miles (225 kilometers) to the northwest. The only active volcanoes in the series are on Hawaii’s island. On Mauna Loa, Kilauea produces more lava than any other volcano.
Kilauea is unlike the volcanoes on the Pacific’s continental margin in that it is not an explosive volcano. Shield volcanoes, like Kilauea, are so named because their profiles mimic that of a shield. Rather than violent or explosive ejections of ash and other material, shield volcanoes are constructed by multiple lava flows.
When a volcanic island is created, the island’s weight causes the plate to sag locally, causing the island to sink. If the water is warm and clear, coral reefs continue to grow upward as it falls to keep themselves at the surface. Finally, the volcanic center may sink beneath the waves, leaving an atoll, a coral reef ring, and coral sand islets surrounding a shallow lagoon. The atoll’s survival is contingent on the current sea level being maintained. The atoll is likely to vanish if sea levels rise. Charles Darwin developed this notion of atoll formation. He saw marine shells at high elevations in the Andes Mountains and assumed that the sinking of the Pacific islands had offset the mountains’ massive uplift.
The Ring of Fire on Pacific Ocean Map
You will find many active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes along the Pacific Plate’s boundaries. The Pacific rim is known as the Ring of Fire because of its numerous volcanoes. The ring contains the majority of the world’s active volcanoes. In 1980, its eruption triggered significant ashfall in Portland, Oregon. Others in the Cascades might erupt, putting cities and communities in the northwest US and British Columbia in peril.
Earthquakes are more prevalent in the Ring of Fire than volcanic eruptions, and they have caused significant damage, which is often exacerbated by construction methods and materials. Many homes in Central America and Mexico, for example, are made of adobe or sun-dried bricks. This material’s walls do not efficiently absorb the lateral vibrations of a quake. Because many sections of the Ring of Fire’s population are fast-growing, earthquakes and eruptions will likely cause more damage.
Such damage might hurt economic development in developing countries like Latin America and the Philippines. The Ring of Fire has been the site of several of the world’s most significant earthquakes, including the 1960 and 2010 Chile earthquakes, the 1964 Alaska earthquake, and the 2011 Japan earthquake. Tsunamis, or massive fast-moving ocean waves, are frequently generated by underwater earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and they can inflict significant damage and loss of life.
The Pacific Climate
Oceans and the atmosphere are inextricably linked by interactions and water and energy transfers, making separation impossible. Because most of the Pacific Ocean map lies between 35° N and 35° S, its climate is tropical and subtropical. Unlike the nearby land, it is a massive absorbent of solar energy. There is little change in temperature over large areas, either in time or place. The interactions between the atmosphere and the relatively uniform surface of this massive reservoir have a significant role in the planet’s climate. The eastern Pacific Ocean map has two subtropical, semi permanent high-pressure systems, similar to the eastern Atlantic Ocean.
They’re named semi permanent because they don’t travel much from day to day, and they’re dubbed oceanic since they’re mainly over water. They do, however, have a significant impact on the climate and weather of the surrounding land. These highs are one of the essential characteristics of atmospheric circulation. The movement of air around them drives the currents of ocean surface water. Winds and surface waters travel clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere around the high center.
On the equatorial sides of the highs, the wind systems that come from this circulation are known as trade winds, whereas on the opposite sides, they are known as westerlies. Temperature differentiates the currents. Warm equatorial currents flow westward, as do those streaming westward toward the poles on the Pacific’s western edge. The westerly winds, as well as those that run parallel to the Pacific’s eastern shores toward the Equator, are frigid.
The trade winds, also known as tropical easterlies, are the most powerful and long-lasting. As they got closer to the Equator, they absorbed a lot of moisture from the warm sea. The sea surface breaks into whitecaps if the winds are strong enough to move faster than 21 feet (6.4 meters) per second. This accelerates water evaporation and releases the latent heat, or energy, of evaporation into the atmosphere. When the trade winds approach the Intertropical Convergence Zone’s “doldrums,” the air rises, and condensation occurs. The majority of the stored energy and moisture is released.
