Days 73-77 – at sea

Some fun facts about the vast Pacific Ocean

We are currently crossing the Pacific Ocean, a journey which, by powered cruise ship, is going to take 17 days (14 of which are sea days). The distance from Sydney to Los Angeles is a daunting 7,000 miles – even making the journey by air takes around 16 hours. To say that every day is ‘fun’ would be an overstatement, but the biggest bonus is the weather which remains very warm and mostly sunny. And to help pass the time we have researched some key information about this enormous ocean to help us look beyond the seemingly endless horizon!

The Pacific Ocean covers an area of 60,000,000 square miles. It reaches from the West Coast of the United States of America to Asia and from the Arctic Ocean to the Antarctic. In certain places it extends down tens of thousands of feet.

The ocean was named by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, however in spite of its name, it engenders some of the strongest hurricanes in the world such as super typhoon Mangkhut which hit the Philippines in 2018, with winds reaching 165 mph.

The Ring of Fire

The Pacific basin in (the ocean bed) is called the Ring of Fire due to the almost constant earthquake and volcanic activity around its edges. This belt of activity stretches some 25,000 miles along the west, north and east of the Pacific and is caused by vast tectonic plates meeting, colliding and sliding underneath each other in a process called subduction. The Ring of Fire accounts for 90% of the world’s earthquakes and 75% of its volcanoes. The region contains 452 volcanoes, and all of the world’s most powerful earthquakes since 1900 have occurred here.

The Mariana Trench

The world’s deepest point, the Mariana trench, is located in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Philippines. At its lowest point, it is 36,000 feet (7 miles) deep; deeper than Mount Everest is high!

The trench was discovered by the crew of the British Royal Navy ship HMS Challenger in 1875. In the groundbreaking expedition, the crew measured a depth of roughly 5 miles using a weighted rope. Jacques Picard and Don Walsh were the first to reach the bottom in 1960 in a custom built submersible. The trench stretches 1580 miles and is 43 miles wide. The pressure at the bottom is over 1000 times that at the surface (16,000 lbs per square inch), and the temperature hovers just above freezing. Fewer humans have visited the bottom of the Mariana Trench than have walked on the moon!

The trench is protected as a US national monument and is home to many highly specialised marine creatures which thrive in extreme cold and total darkness such as the Mariana snail fish, the vampire squid, the deep sea dragon fish, zombie worms, the barrel fish and the fang tooth fish (see pics below!) 🐟😵‍💫🐟