List of islands in the Pacific Ocean
The Pacific islands are a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean. They are further categorized into three major island groups: Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Depending on the context, the term Pacific Islands may refer to one of several different concepts: (1) those countries and islands with common Austronesian origins, (2) the islands once (or currently) colonized, or (3) the geographical region of Oceania.
This list of islands in the Pacific Ocean is organized by archipelago or political boundary. In order to keep this list of moderate size, the more complete lists for countries with large numbers of small or uninhabited islands have been hyperlinked.
The umbrella term Pacific Islands has taken on several meanings.[1] Sometimes it is used to refer only to the islands defined as lying within Oceania.[2][3][4] At other times, it is used to refer to the islands of the Pacific Ocean that were previously colonized by the British, French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, or Japanese, or by the United States. Examples include Borneo, the Pitcairn Islands and Taiwan (also known as Formosa).[5]
A commonly applied biogeographic definition includes islands with oceanic geology that lie within Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia and the eastern Pacific (also known as the southeastern Pacific).[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] These are usually considered to be the "Tropical Pacific Islands".[13] In the 1990s, ecologists Dieter Mueller-Dombois and Frederic Raymond Fosberg broke the Tropical Pacific Islands up into the following subdivisions:[14]