PACIFICO, DON or DAVID PACIFICO A Portuguese Jew born a British subject in Gibraltar who brought an action against the Hellenic Government claiming £26,000 compensation for his house in Athens burnt down in 1847 in an anti-Semitic riot. Pacifico finally received compensation. PACIFIC OCEAN, the largest division of the hydrosphere, lying between Asia and Australia and North and South America. It is nearly landlocked to the north, communicating with the Arctic ocean only by Bering strait, which is 65 km. wide and of small depth. The southern boundary was sometimes regarded as the parallel of 661° S., but this limit is artificial, and it is now considered that the Pacific extends to the borders of the Antarctic continent, exactly as the Atlantic and Indian oceans do. As east and west boundaries in the higher southern latitudes one may take the meridians passing through South cape in Tasmania and Cape Horn. The north to south distance from Bering strait to Antarctica, near Cape Adare, is 15,500 km. or 8,35o nautical miles, and the Pacific attains its greatest breadth between Panama and Mindanao (Philippine Isl.), when it measures 17,200 km. or 9,30o nautical miles. The distance between Yoko hama (Japan) and San Francisco is about half as great again as that from New York to Southampton; similarly the distance between Sydney and Cape Horn is greater than that from Buenos Aires to Cape Town by fully a half. The coasts of the Pacific are of varied contour. The American coasts are for the most part mountainous and unbroken, the chief indentation being the Gulf of California ; but the general type is departed from in the extreme north and south, the southern coast of South America consisting of bays and fjords with scattered islands, while the coast of Alaska is similarly broken in the south and becomes low and swampy towards the north. The coast of Australia is high and unbroken; there are no inlets of considerable size, although the small openings include some of the finest harbours in the world, as Moreton bay and Port Jackson. The Asiatic coasts are for the most part low and irregular and a number of seas are more or less completely enclosed and cut off from communi cation with the open ocean. Bering sea is bounded by the Alaskan
peninsula and the chain of the Aleutian islands; the Sea of Okhotsk is enclosed by the peninsula of Kamchatka and the Kurile islands; the Sea of Japan is shut off by Sakhalin island, the Japanese islands and the peninsula of Korea ; the Yellow sea is an opening between the coast of China and Korea; the China sea lies between the Asiatic continent and the island of Formosa ; the Philippine group, Palawan and Borneo. •Amongst the islands of Malay archipelago are a number of enclosed areas —the Sulu, Celebes, Java, Banda and Arafura seas.
The question as to where within the Malay archipelago the limit between the Indian and Pacific oceans is to be drawn, is as difficult to answer as the question of the natural boundary between Further India and Australia. Wallace placed the latter in the Macassar strait, so that Borneo would belong to the Indian province, and Celebes to the Australian. So far as we know to-day we must argue, from oceanographic considerations, e.g., the con figuration of the sea floor, the properties of the water, etc., that the deep basins of the Sulu sea, Celebes sea, Flores sea, Savu sea and Banda sea, belong to the Pacific, while the shallow Java sea and the South China sea are part of the Indian ocean.
The Pacific was first scientifically explored by the great Eng lish Deep-Sea Expedition of H.M.S. "Challenger" (1872-76) and then by the German expedition of S.M.S. "Gazelle" (1874-76), by the two United States ships "Tuscarora" (1874-76, and "Albatross" (1888, 1890-92, 1899-1900, 1904-05), by the Russian warship "Vitiaz" (1887), by S.M.S. "Planet" (1906-14) and others. For many important soundings in the south-west Pacific we are indebted to H.M.S. "Penguin" and many British cable ships; in high southern latitudes the "Discovery" carried out many observations. Lately many oceanographical enterprises have been prosecuted by the Japanese navy, as well as from the U.S. oceanographical station at San Diego (California).