Islands

There are more than 20,000 islands in the Pacific. Most of them lie in the Central and South Pacific, a region called Oceania. Oceania's divisions are Melanesia on the southwest, including New Guinea; Micronesia on the northwest; and Polynesia on the east, including Hawaii and New Zealand. Other islands lie near Australia and near western North and South America; and off eastern Asia are the Japanese, Philippine, and Indonesian groups.

Islands of the South Pacific have been called South Sea Islands ; those of the extreme southwestern Pacific, East Indies.

The total population of all the islands in 1990 was more than 390,000,000; of this number, some 364,000,000 persons were concentrated on the islands of Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Most of the other islands are thinly populated or uninhabited.

The world's second- and third-largest islands—New Guinea and Borneo—are in the Pacific, but most islands in this ocean are small, many less than one square mile (2.6 km 2) each.