It should come as no surprise to you that most of the Earth's surface is covered by water.

This is a simple fact that we've all learned about since our earliest memories in school.

But you probably will still be surprised by the absolute sheer scale of the biggest part of our ocean, the Pacific.

To say that the Pacific Ocean is huge would be an equally huge understatement.

The Pacific Ocean is colossal.

So let's begin by talking about this fact.

Imagine that you're on a boat at approximately these coordinates.

You're in the Pacific Ocean just slightly off the coast of Chile and Peru in South America.

Then imagine you've got in a submarine submerged all the way to the bottom of the ocean and then drilled all the way through the earth out to the other side of the world and came up on the other side.

After doing all of that, you would still find yourself inside of the Pacific Ocean, specifically the Gulf of Tonkin just off the coast of Vietnam and China.

The Pacific Ocean is so massive that it contains several of its own antipodes, or spots on the opposite side of the world that remain in the same ocean.

But we're just getting started here.

There are parts of the Pacific Ocean that stretched across more than half of the planet's surface, but the longest continuous stretch of water spans between the islands of Indonesia and the coast of Colombia.

This stretch is nearly 19,800 kilometers long.

This is such a huge distance you could fit the entire diameter of the moon between it.

Actually, you could fit five moons in this distance and still have room left over zooming out to this view of the Pacific from above on Google maps can give you this image, which gives the perception that it takes up almost half of the planet.

However, this image is deceiving because in reality you could never really see half of the planet at the same time.

Since the earth is shaped like a sphere, there's a point where the planet begins curving out from your field of view.

That's called the horizon, and no matter how far away you get from Earth, you're always going to be dealing with the horizon that blocks viewing a full half of the planet.

In reality, the Pacific Ocean takes up approximately one third of the planet's surface, which is still a highly significant amount significant enough to produce a map like this one.

Here you can see two separate ways to divide the world surface between two equal hemispheres.

Most of us are probably more familiar with the Eastern and Western hemispheric view of the world.

But this view isn't really based on anything other than the British who decided that they were the center of the world back in the 19th century.

In this new division, the world is divided between the water hemisphere and the land hemisphere, the two sides of the world that contain the most water and the most land.

The Pacific takes a most of the water hemisphere, and in total, this entire half of the planet is 89% water, 5% polar ice cap and only 6% dry land.

If you were stranded in the oceans on this side of the world, it might indeed be a while until you ever discovered land.

Now, with all that being said in purely numerical form, the Pacific Ocean is 165.25 million square kilometers and surface area, and that's a challenging number to visualize.

So think about it this way.

The surface area of every single continent of land in the world, combined from North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, Antarctica and even throwing in Greenland just for good measure is only 148 million square kilometers.

This means that you could fit every single continent in the world together inside of just the Pacific, and still have million's of square kilometers left open.

Let's think about this another way.

Imagine the planet Mars.

Measure out every single square kilometer across the entire Martian surface, every valley and canyon and crater.

Now let's pour the Pacific Ocean Overmars.

Eventually, you'll completely submerged.

All of Mars is 145 million square kilometers of surface area.

In fact, the Pacific Ocean is a whopping 20 million square kilometers larger than the surface area of Mars, and we've only started talking about the surface area of the Pacific.

Not yet its depth.

Indeed, the Pacific isn't just huge across.

It's also huge below it's the deepest of any of Earth's oceans.

The challenger deep in the Marianas trench is the deepest point in the world that we're aware of so far, plunging nearly 11 kilometers beneath the waves and other trenches have points that reached very similar depths.

The Tonga Trench Philippine Trench and the Curl Kamchatka Trench all have spots over 10.3 kilometers deep, and the mean depth across the entire Pacific is over 4000 m.

The average depth in the Pacific is over 2600 times deeper than the deep end of an average American swimming pool.

With all of that size and all that depth, the Pacific alone contains 710 million cubic kilometers worth of water, which is roughly 50% of all the world's oceanic water.

All of this puts into perspective Howard ridiculously bold the ancient Polynesian explorers really were.

They sailed out into an unknown, an uncharted ocean bigger than all of the world's continents combined, bigger even than an entire planet, just in the hopes of discovering some new islands and discover they did the Pacific is home to over 25,000 distinct islands spread out across almost incomprehensible distances.

But already by the year 1200 the Polynesians have reached virtually all of them from their original starting point back in Taiwan.

Some of these islands continue to be absurdly remote and difficult to get to even today, let alone 1000 years ago.

The Pacific Ocean is so vast and so empty that it contains many of the most remote and difficult to get to places in the world.

Take Honolulu and Hawaii, for example.

This is the most remote city with a population over 100,000 people anywhere in the world, because the nearest other city of comparable or greater size is San Francisco, over 3800 kilometers away, about the same distance as New York City is away from Los Angeles.

The Polynesian still found it over 700 years ago.

Easter Island is arguably the most remote inhabited island in the world because it's over 2000 kilometers away from the nearest other piece of land, and that piece of land happens to be Pitcairn Island, which itself is an absurdly remote, hard to get to island in the middle of nowhere.

Besides Pitcairn, Easter Island is over 26 100 kilometers away from the nearest town with over 500 people on the island of Mandir, Eva and it's over 3500 kilometers away from the nearest other continent, South America.

It's also home to the world's most remote airport, since the nearest other airport is over in the Gambier Islands, 2600 kilometers away, and the nearest major airport is in Santiago, over 3700 kilometers away.

Comparatively, not even the airport at the South Pole is as remote as the one on Easter Island, since the nearest other airport to there is just over 1300 kilometers away.

Still, the Polynesians may have discovered it over 1200 years ago.

In canoes, the Polynesians were master discoverers and explorers who honed their skills over generations of navigators.

It takes time and patience to learn how to discover the islands across the planet sized ocean.

But there was only one way to start.

Just get in the boat and begin the journey.

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