Oceania in the World Map

Oceania and Pacific Ocean islands based on a world map from the World Factbook, CIA, February 2025 (click on the map to enlarge). Robinson projection, standard parallels 38°N and 38°S. Names and border representations are not necessarily official. Oceania is the largest area of the surface of Planet Earth without large continental masses.

Oceania is a geographical division in the world, which includes Australia (the largest island, also bathed by the Indian Ocean) and the islands on the Pacific Ocean, such as French Polynesia, Fiji, Hawaii, New Caledonia, and New Zealand, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

At the beginning of the 16th century, Oceania was not even known to Europeans, so in 1492, Christopher Columbus thought he had landed in Japan, but in fact it was the Bahamas. The Pacific Ocean was explored by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães) in the Spanish expedition of 1519–1522, when he discovered, for the Europeans, the Strait of Magellan, allowing his fleet to pass from the Atlantic into the Pacific Ocean and perform the first European navigation to Asia via the Pacific.