The term Oceania generally refers to Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and the South Pacific islands.
Oceania stretches across a vast ocean area and includes 20,000 or so islands that makeup Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Thousands of the islands are uninhabited, and many are formed from coral reefs and underwater volcanoes.
Papua New Guinea is made up of the eastern half of New Guinea and around 600 smaller islands.
Oceania facts:
- The Great Barrier Reef spreads for 1,250 miles / 2,011.68 km along Australia’s coast. It covers an area of 135,000 square miles / 349,648.39 square km.
- The capital of New Zealand, Wellington, is the southernmost capital city in the world.
- Australia has a sum of 529,346 square miles / 1,370,999.84 square km of desert—18% of Australia is desert land.
- In the Marshall Islands, the Kwajalein atoll is a coral ring enclosing a lagoon of around 1,100 square miles / 2,848.98 square km. It is the biggest atoll in the world.
- The Marshall Islands comprise two island chains which include 30 atolls and 1,152 islands.
- The 5.5 million people of Papua New Guinea speak around 800 different languages.
- New Zealand uses hydro-electric power and has very little industry, so it is one of the world’s cleanest, least-polluted countries.