Explorer Ferdinand Magellan named the Pacific Ocean in the 16th Century. ... He called this body of water pacific, due to the calmness of the water at the time ('pacific' means peaceful). When Magellan and his crew entered the Pacific Ocean after their long journey, they thought that the Spice Islands were close at hand.
Magellan called the ocean Pacífico (or "Pacific" meaning, "peaceful") because, after sailing through the stormy seas off Cape Horn, the expedition found calm waters.
In water, absorption is strong in the red and weak in the blue, thus red light is absorbed quickly in the ocean leaving blue. Almost all sunlight that enters the ocean is absorbed, except very close to the coast. The red, yellow, and green wavelengths of sunlight are absorbed by water molecules in the ocean.
The Atlantic Ocean is still growing now, because of sea-floor spreading from the mid-Atlantic Ridge, while the Pacific Ocean is said to be shrinking because the sea floor is folding under itself.
You can clearly see that the North American plate is moving westward and Eurasian and Australian plates are moving eastward, squeezing the Pacific plate between them. On the other hand, All plates that share boundary in the Atlantic Ocean are receding from each other, thus making the Atlantic wider.
Cape Horn. At this spot the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet, often in a confrontation. No land to the east, none to the west—winds sweep all the way around the world from the west.
Though the peoples of Asia and Oceania have traveled the Pacific Ocean since prehistoric times, the eastern Pacific was first sighted by Europeans in the early 16th century when Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and discovered the great "southern sea" which he named Mar del ...