Pacific

Our route follows the Pacific coast through densely populated neighbourhoods.

But the seafaring peoples of the Pacific islands, the Polynesians and the Micronesians, were quite possibly the world’s greatest navigators.

Um, islanders from all over the Pacific learned to use the stars for navigation.

In addition to finding an increase of suitable browse, like huckleberry and vine maple, Arthur Einarsen, longtime game biologist in the Pacific Northwest, found quality of browse in the open areas to be substantially more nutritive.

Two species of deer have been prevalent in the Puget Sound area of Washington State in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

The undisputed pre-Columbian presence in Oceania of the sweet potato, which is a New World domesticate, has sometimes been used to support Heyerdahl’s “American Indians in the Pacific” theories.

Detailed studies of the winds and currents using computer simulations suggest that drifting canoes would have been a most unlikely means of colonizing the Pacific.

Contrary to the arguments of some that much of the pacific was settled by Polynesians accidentally marooned after being lost and adrift, it seems reasonable that this feat was accomplished by deliberate colonization expeditions that set out fully stocked with food and domesticated plants and animals.

The basic cultural requirements for the successful colonization of the Pacific islands include the appropriate boat-building, sailing, and navigation skills to get to the islands in the first place, domesticated plants and gardening skills suited to often marginal conditions, and a varied inventory of fishing implements and techniques.

Contrary to these theorists, the overwhelming evidence of physical anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology shows that the Pacific islanders came from Southeast Asia and were skilled enough as navigators to sail against the prevailing winds and currents.

Later Heyerdahl suggested that the Pacific was peopled by three migrations:by Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest of North America drifting to Hawaii, by Peruvians drifting to Easter Island, and by Melanesians.

In 1947 Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl drifted on a balsa-log raft westward with the winds and currents across the Pacific from South America to prove his theory that Pacific islanders were Native Americans (also called American Indians).

They inferred that the Egyptians even crossed the Pacific to found the great civilizations of the New World (North and South America).

For example, British anthropologists G. Elliot Smith and W. J. Perry assumed that only Egyptians would have been skilled enough to navigate and colonize the Pacific.

Many older theories implicitly deprecated the navigational abilities and overall cultural creativity of the Pacific islanders.

Pacific islanders are variously thought to have come from North America, South America, Egypt, Israel,and India, as well as Southeast Asia.

Speculation on the origin of these Pacific islanders began as soon as outsiders encountered them, in the absence of solid linguistic, archaeological, and biological data,many fanciful and mutually exclusive theories were devised.

Polynesia is the central Pacific area in the great triangle defined by Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand.

Melanesia, in the southwest Pacific, contains the large islands of New Guinea, the Solomons, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia.

The greater Pacific region, traditionally called Oceania, consists of three cultural areas: Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.

Because of the barrier of ice to the east, the Pacific Ocean to the west, and populated areas to the north, there may have been a greater impetus for people to move in a southerly direction.

A Zenith star was a really bright star that would pass directly overhead at a particular latitude, uh, at a particular distance from the equator, often at latitude associates with some, uh, particular Pacific island.

Um, islanders from all over the Pacific learned to use the stars for navigation.

Um, the key to the Pacific islanders’ success was probably their location near the equator.

Long before the development of advanced navigational tools in Europe, Pacific islanders were traveling from New Zealand to Hawaii and back again, using nothing but the stars as their navigation instruments.

But the seafaring peoples of the Pacific islands, the Polynesians and the Micronesians, were quite possibly the world’s greatest navigators.

Professor: Sure. The volcanoes in the Hawaii islands, in the Pacific Ocean are shield volcanoes.

So the position of The Pacific Plate 50 million years ago can be determined by moving it such that a 50-million-year-oil volcano in the hot-spot trail sits at the location of Hawaii today.

For example, given the current position of the Pacific Plate, Hawaii is above the Pacific Ocean hot spot.

Other islands, including Tahiti and Easter Islands in the pacific, Reunion and Mauritius in the India Ocean, and indeed most of the large islands in the world’s oceans, owe their existence to mantle plumes.

A glance at a map of the Pacific Ocean reveals that there are many islands far out at sea that are actually volcanoes----many no longer active, some overgrown with coral----that originated from activity at points in the interior of the Pacific Plate that forms the Pacific seafloor.

This then causes the warm water in the western Pacific to flow eastward, increasing sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific.

However, in other years the Southern Oscillation, for unknown reasons, swings in the opposite direction, dramatically changing the usual conditions described above, with pressure increasing in the western Pacific and decreasing in the eastern Pacific.

The western Pacific develops a thick, warm layer of water while the eastern Pacific has the cold Humboldt Current enhanced by upwelling.

During a typical year, the eastern Pacific has a higher pressure than the western Pacific does.

He noted that a rise in atmospheric pressure in the eastern Pacific is usually accompanied by a fall in pressure in the western Pacific and vice versa.

Over 60 years ago, Sir Gilbert Walker, a British scientist, discovered a connection between surface pressure readings at weather stations on the eastern and western sides of the Pacific.

The processes that interact to produce an El Nifio involve conditions all across the Pacific, not just in the waters off South America.

Not only do El Nifios affect the temperature of the equatorial Pacific, but the strongest of them impact global weather.

The cold Humboldt Current of the Pacific Ocean flows toward the equator along the coasts of Ecuador and Peru in South America.

Now, for many years archaeologists have speculated that agriculture also arose independently in another center, too - New Guinea, which is just north of Australia, in the South Pacific Ocean.

A good illustration of this occurred after sea otters were eliminated from some Pacific kelp (seaweed) bed ecosystems: the kelp beds were practically obliterated too because in the absence of sea otter predation, sea urchin populations exploded and consumed most of the kelp and other macroalgae.

Their diversity of coral genera is greatest in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific.

A long time after Darwin put forward this theory, some deep boreholes were drilled in the Pacific atolls in the 1950s.

Some atolls are very large—Kwajelein in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific is 120 kilometers long and as much as 24 kilometers across-but most are very much smaller, and rise only a few meters above the water.

You're getting a chain of volcanic islands where the hot plume melts through the crust under the Pacific Ocean at one point after another with active volcanoes on the younger islands that are now just above the plume, and the other islands,

Searching for the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 1818, Sir John Ross had lowered his "deep-sea clam"—a sort of bivalved sediment scoop-into the water of Baffin Bay ( an inlet between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans), which the determined to be more than a thousand fathoms deep in some places.

And the example from your reading was the forest ecosystem along the Pacific coast of North America.