Dorothy Keyport, age 13, of Mesa, Ariz., for her question:
WHO NAMED THE PACIFIC OCEAN?
The largest and deepest body of water in the world is the Pacific Ocean. When the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Megellan first saw the great sea, he named it Pacific, which means "peaceful."
Magellan sailed for weeks, driven by soft winds. He saw flying fishes and porpoises play in the ocean's warm, quiet waters. He didn't know then that the mighty Pacific wasn't always peaceful since it stretched all the way from the frozen north to the frozen south.
The Pacific Ocean covers more than a third of the entire surface of the world. If all of the continents were placed in the Pacific, there would still be room for another the size of Asia, the largest continent.
The widest part of the Pacific is near the Equator, between Panama and the Malay Peninsula. Here it measures about 11,000 miles, almost half the distance around the world.
The Pacific has an average depth of about 14,000 feet, but the ocean floor is very uneven. There are even underwater mountains and ridges. Most of the underwater mountains rise in the central and western Pacific. Geologists tell us that most of the underwater mountains are either active or inactive volcanoes.
The deepest sections of the ocean are near the shores. They include the trenches that border the island chains of the western Pacific. Most of these trenches are from 20,000 to 30,000 feet deep.
The Mariana Trench, near Guam, includes the Challenger Deep, the deepest known place in any ocean in the world. It is 36,198 feet deep.
You'll find the largest tides along the rim of the Pacific. Off the west coast of Korea, as an example, the ocean is 15 to 30 feet deeper at high tide than at low tide.
In mid ocean, on the other hand, the tides are small. At Midway Island the variation between high and low tides is only about one foot.
The first people to sail the Pacific were probably the ancestors of today's inhabitants of the Pacific Islands. They probably came from southeast Asia.
Even though the Pacific means "peaceful," the great sea can rise to heights of fury. Out of its vast expanses blow some of the most destructive storms on Earth. Its typhoons have wrecked fleets of ships and leveled island cities. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions deep in the sea have caused destructive tidal waves.
The Pacific's tidal waves, which are also called tsunamis, sometimes reach heights of 100 feet and roll completely over islands in their paths.
There are thousands of islands in the Pacific. Only a few can be found in the eastern and northern Pacific. Most of them are located in the center and southern part of the ocean.
The largest islands of the Pacific include such island nations as Japan, New Zealand and the Philippines.
The floor of the Pacific is a storehouse of minerals. Little of the mineral wealth, which includes cobalt, copper, manganese and nickel, has as yet been tapped.