Oceania

This is Oceania, a geographic region. Oceania is sometimes called a continent, but that’s... not quite accurate. A continent is a large landmass. Oceania is mostly water!

It spans around 12,000 kilometres of the Pacific Ocean from East to West and 6,000 kilometres from North to South. Oceania is made up of the Australian continent as well as most of the island countries and territories in the Pacific. It is the ocean that connects all of these places, and geographers use the name Oceania to group them as one region of the world. It can be helpful to think of Oceania as including most of the land that lies between Asia and the Americas. It is commonly divided into four parts: Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.

Australasia consists of Australia and New Zealand, and makes up over 90 percent of Oceania’s land area. Melanesia consists of four independent countries. Polynesia, five countries and sometimes New Zealand. And Micronesia, also five. So in total, Oceania consists of sixteen independent countries.

Oceania also includes some territories governed by other countries. Melanesia and Polynesia consist mainly of islands formed by volcanoes with relatively high elevations, often thousands of metres above sea level. These are high islands. Volcanic soils are good for growing crops, and the high elevations means that rainfall is plentiful. Micronesia consists mainly of islands made up of coral with elevations less than 5 metres above sea level.

These are low islands. Most of the islands in Oceania are low islands, and many are shaped like rings. How does that happen? First, a volcano bursts out of the ocean and erupts. Then, corals build a reef on the slopes of the volcano.

After millions of years, the part of the volcano above the ocean erodes due to weather and waves. All that’s left above the surface of the water is the coral reef that surrounded the volcano. This ring-shaped coral island is an atoll. Most of the world’s atolls are found in Oceania. Because Oceania is spread across many remote, small islands, the population is low.

Less than 1 percent of the World’s population lives in Oceania. The remoteness means that many plants and animals are found here and nowhere else. Oceania has unique biodiversity. The most famous Australian animals are probably the koala and the kangaroo. They are mammals that carry their newborn young in a pouch - marsupials.

Almost 70 percent of the marsupials on Earth come from Australia. And Oceania is the only place in the world where mammals that lay eggs - monotremes - live. The people of Oceania have long relied on the ocean, for food, resources, and communication. It is part of the cultural identity of many Pacific islands. However, this region is very vulnerable to changes in the climate and environment.

Atolls and other low islands are constantly at risk from natural disasters and rising sea levels. In October 2018, one of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, East Island, was almost entirely washed away by a very powerful storm. No one lived on East Island, but it was an important nesting site for the endangered Hawaiian monk seal. This could be the fate of other islands in the Pacific. That is why governments and other groups in Oceania, like the Pacific Islands Forum, are taking steps to reduce the effects of climate change.

Indigenous knowledge and international support is already helping the island countries of Oceania adapt and hopefully thrive in the future.