Guide of PACIFIC OCEAN

Pacific Ocean. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05
Pacific Ocean largest and deepest ocean, c.70, 000, 000 sq mi (181, 300, 000 sq km), occupying about one third of the earth’s surface; named by the Spanish explorer, Ferdinand Magellan; the southern part is also known as the South Sea.
1 Physical Geography Extent and Seas The Pacific Ocean extends from the arctic to antarctic regions between North and South America on the east and Asia and Australia on the west.
It is connected with the Arctic Ocean by the Bering Strait; with the Atlantic Ocean by the Drake Passage, Straits of Magellan, and the Panama Canal; and with the Indian Ocean by passages in the Malay Archipelago and between Australia and Antarctica.
The principal arms of the Pacific Ocean are (in the north) the Bering Sea; (in the east) the Gulf of California; (in the south) Ross Sea; and (in the west) the Sea of Okhotsk, the Sea of Japan, and the Yellow, East China, South China, Philippine, Coral, and Tasman seas.
Few large rivers drain into the Pacific Ocean; the largest are the Columbia of North America and the Huang He and Chang (Yangtze) of China.
2 Coastline and Islands Along the E Pacific shore, generally, the coast rises abruptly from a deep seafloor to mountain heights on land, and there is a narrow continental shelf.


PACIFIC OCEAN

NOAA News Online (Story 2358)
29, 2004 — NOAA scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii went to work within minutes of getting a seismic signal that an earthquake occurred off the west coast of Northern Sumatra, Indonesia.
NOAA issued a bulletin indicating no threat of a tsunami to Hawaii, the West Coast of North America or to other coasts in the Pacific Basin—the area served by the existing tsunami warning system established by the Pacific rim countries and operated by NOAA in Hawaii.
(Click NOAA image for larger view of tsunami buoy being deployed in the Pacific Ocean from the NOAA ship Ronald H.
The Pacific Basin tsunami warning system did not detect a tsunami in the Indian Ocean since there are no buoys in place there.
Even without a way to detect whether a tsunami had formed in the Indian Ocean, NOAA officials tried to get the message out to other nations not a part of its Pacific warning system to alert them of the possibility of a tsunami.
However, the tsunami raced across the ocean at speeds up to 500 mph.
Below is the timeline of agency's actions once the undersea earthquake was detected by the NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.
The rupture of the great earthquake begins in the Indian Ocean off NW Sumatra, Indonesia.

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Photo by www.spacescan.org

Natural History Magazine | Feature
Across the Pacific Ocean, plastics, plastics, everywhere.
Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcass of this Laysan albatoss on Kure Atoll, which lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the North Pacific.
It was on our way home, after finishing the Los Angeles-to-Hawaii sail race known as the Transpac, that my crew and I first caught sight of the trash, floating in one of the most remote regions of all the oceans.
Throughout the race our strategy, like that of every other boat in the race, had been mainly to avoid the North Pacific subtropical gyre—the great high-pressure system in the central Pacific Ocean that, most of the time, is centered just north of the racecourse and halfway between Hawaii and the mainland.
I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea.
Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic..
Few seafarers ever cross the North Pacific subtropical gyre.
Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world’s leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the “eastern garbage patch.” But “patch” doesn’t begin to convey the reality.

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Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Program (POST): Project Descriptions: Census of Marine Life Portal
A program to develop and promote the application of new electronic tagging technology to study usage of marine environments and migration routes of Pacific Salmon..
Visit the POST web site The Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) program, one of seven initial field projects of the Census of Marine Life (CoML), is a major program designed to develop and promote the application of new electronic tagging technology to study the marine life history of Pacific salmon.
POTENT (Pacific Ocean Tracking and Evaluation NeTwork) will sit on the seabed of the continental shelf and slope and be used to monitor fish movements along the shelf and into the open ocean.
POTENT array data can then be applied toward the development of fishery management policies aimed at the sustainable harvest of Pacific salmon resources, and the technology can be applied to other species of marine fish as well..
Acoustic tags implanted in Pacific salmon will allow the movements of individual fish to be tracked for the duration of their residence on the continental shelf, and thus, in principle, for the entire life history of shelf-resident salmon stocks.
While much is known about the freshwater life history phases of Pacific salmon, very little is known about their marine life history.

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