What Is Oceania and Why Is It Called So?
What Is Oceania and Why Is It Called So? Oceania is a general term used to include all the islands in a vast area of the tropical Pacific Ocean, from New Guinea to Australia and New Zealand, and as far north as Hawaii, often denotes as a synonym for Australasian ecozone or the Pacific ecozone. One of eight terrestrial ecozones, which constitute the major ecological regions of the planet. The Oceania ecozone includes all of Micronesia, Fiji, and all of Polynesia except New Zealand.
New Zealand, New Guinea, Melanesia apart from Fiji, and Australia constitute the separate Australasia ecozone. The Malay Archipelago is part of the Indomalaya ecozone. Related to these concepts are Near Oceania, that part of western Island Melanesia which has been inhabited for tens of millennia, and Remote Oceania, which is more recently settled.
First explored by Europeans from the 16th century onward. Portuguese navigators, between 1512 and 1526, reached the Tanimbar Islands, some of the Caroline Islands and west Papua New Guinea. On his first voyage in the 18th century, James Cook, who later arrived at the highly developed Hawaiian Islands, went to Tahiti and followed the east coast of Australia for the first time.
The geographer Conrad Malte-Brun coined the French term Océanie c.1812. The term is used because, unlike the other continental groupings, it is the ocean that links the parts of the region together.
Oceania has a land area of 8,525,989 square kilometres (3,291,903 sq mi) and a population of over 47 million. Situated in the southeast of the Asia-Pacific region, Oceania, when compared to continental regions, is the smallest in land area and the second smallest in population after Antarctica.
Oceania has a diverse mix of economies from the highly developed and globally competitive financial markets of Australia and New Zealand, which rank high in quality of life and human development index, to the much less developed economies that belong to countries such as Kiribati and Tuvalu, while also including medium-sized economies of Pacific islands such as Palau, Fiji and Tonga. The largest and most populous country in Oceania is Australia, with Sydney being the largest city of both Oceania and Australia.