☆"Pearls" scattered in the Pacific Ocean☆
Open the world map, follow China down to the right, you can see that there is a vast Pacific Ocean. In this vast ocean, there are more than 10,000 large and small islands, like dazzling pearls, scattered on the sunny and choppy blue sea. Most of these islands are located in vast seas in the south-central and southwestern Pacific Ocean.
These islands are usually divided into three archipelagos: Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.
The three archipelagos have a total land area of about 560,000 square kilometers and a population of about 11 million in 2020.
The part to the west is called Melanesia, which means "Black Islands". It includes the four independent sovereign States of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji, as well as French New Caledonia. The Melanesian archipelago stretches from Papua New Guinea in the west to the Fiji Islands in the east, with a land area of more than 530,000 square kilometers and a population of about 5.9 million. The island group has a large land area and a large population, which is the largest of the three major island groups.
A group of islands in the central and northern parts is called Micronesia, which originally means "small island archipelago". It includes the independent states of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati (Gilbert Islands and Ocean Islands), Ceru and Palau, as well as the U.S. Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and Wake Island, which is occupied by the United States. The island group has a land area of 2,643 square kilometers and a population of about 500,000.
Polynesia, an island group in the eastern Pacific Ocean, originally meaning "multi-island archipelago", is the archipelago with the largest distribution and the largest number of islands among the three major island groups. It includes independent or autonomous states such as the Cook Islands, Kiribati (Phoenix and Lane Islands), Samoa, Tonga and Tuvalu, as well as French Polynesia, British Pitcairn, Chile's Easter Island, American Samoa, Johnston Island under U.S. administration, Midway Island and U.S. "unincorporated territory" Jarvis Island, as well as the U.S. state of Hawaii and its affiliated islands. The island group has a land area of about 27,000 square kilometers and a population of more than 1 million.
In the vast ocean region, Papua New Guinea has a large land area, while other land areas are relatively small, but they all have vast waters disproportionate to their small land area, forming a maritime power with less soil and more water. Kiribati, for example, has a land area of only 812 square kilometers, but the sea area is 3.5 million square kilometers, spanning nearly 4,000 kilometers from east to west and 2,000 kilometers from north to south. The Federated States of Micronesia has only more than 700 square kilometers of land territory, but it has nearly 3 million square kilometers of water, extending from east to west for more than 2,500 kilometers. The Marshall Islands has a land area of only 181 square kilometers, but 2.13 million square kilometers of water. Solomon Islands has 1.63 million square kilometers of sea and Fiji has 1.26 million square kilometers of sea area. Papua New Guinea has 2.3 million square kilometres of water. These island nations have such a vast ocean area that they are truly a complete maritime kingdom.
