Covering about 63 million square miles (163 million km²), roughly one‑third of Earth’s surface, the Pacific Ocean is big enough to fit all the world’s landmasses and still leave spare space. It’s not just wide; it stretches about 12,300 miles (19,800 km) from west to east.

Average depths sink to 3,682 m (12,080 ft) and plunge to nearly 11,000 m (36,000 ft) in the Challenger Deep, far deeper than Mount Everest is tall. Altogether, the ocean holds roughly half of the world’s ocean water , with a volume estimated at 714 million km³.

The Pacific isn’t a blank blue expanse: it contains around 25,000 islands, more than any other ocean. These islands fall into three broad regions: Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, and range from towering volcanic peaks to low coral atolls.

Plate tectonics carved this basin from a prehistoric super‑ocean called Panthalassa, and the Pacific continues to evolve as its margins slowly shrink by about an inch a year, feeding the volatile “Ring of Fire” that rings its rim.

On flat maps, the Pacific often seems modest because cartographers compress it between continents. The overlay from World in Maps corrects that impression by showing how much blue remains after the continents are dropped in.

Recognising the ocean’s true scale underscores its global importance: it regulates climate, hosts a vast web of life and supports millions of people. Protecting it from overfishing, pollution, and climate change isn’t just an environmental cause but a necessity for the planet we all share.

Most of us recognise the Mercator projection—the rectangular world map that lines classrooms, textbooks, and even boardrooms.

Created in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator for navigational purposes, it was revolutionary in its time. It preserved accurate angles and directions for sailors, but at a cost: countries near the poles became wildly distorted in size.

Greenland, for example, appears to rival Africa in area, even though Africa is 14 times larger. Europe and North America look oversized compared to the Global South, reinforcing a geopolitical bias that persists to this day.

The campaign points out that “North on top” is not a geographical law , but rather a convention shaped by centuries of Eurocentrism. Medieval Christian and early Islamic maps often placed the East at the top—orienting the world differently, quite literally.

This choice shapes perceptions: what looks bigger, feels more important. The over-representation of Europe and North America subtly influences how people understand global power, trade, and politics.

The Gall-Peters projection, shown as an alternative, attempts to address this distortion by preserving area rather than shape. On a Gall-Peters map, Africa looms large, while Europe shrinks to a more proportionate size. This view challenges long-standing visual biases ingrained by the Mercator projection.

The visuals also highlight that even orientation is a choice—some modern maps centre the Pacific , not Europe, or flip north and south. One graphic even imagines a map from the perspective of ocean-dwelling creatures, emphasising that 70% of Earth’s surface is ocean, not land.