What's the largest ocean that ever existed on Earth?

According to the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, the Pacific is the largest ocean in the world, covering more than 30% of the surface. The remnants of the largest ocean in Earth's history are only shown in that titanic sea.

We don't know what the largest ocean on our planet was.

Brendan Murphy, a geology professor at St. FrancisXavier University in Nova Scotia, told Live Science that Panthalassa was a world-spanning sea that surrounded Pangaea from about 300 million to 200 million years ago.

If you only have one large supercontinent, then there's only one ocean that exists around it.

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There will never be another Pangaea.

All the single world oceans would have been comparable in size. Today's continents fit together in Pangaea, which was the most recent supercontinent. A supercontinent called Rodinia combined Earth's landmasses in a different configuration about 650 million years ago.

Murphy said Panthalassa would have stacked at least another 1,860 miles onto the Pacific. If you traveled by jet plane across the equator, it would take 10 hours to cross the Pacific but 15 to span Panthalassa. Panthalassa's additional width would allow for nearly one more moon at the Pacific's widest point.

Approximately 70% of the Earth's surface was covered by Panthalassa, according to a review in the journal Earth-Science Reviews. According to IOC UNESCO, the Pacific's 30% of the Earth's surface adds up to more than 163 million square miles.

The opening of the Atlantic Ocean caused Pangaea to break up in large part because of Panthalassa. Panthalassa's remnants became the Pacific, so you can picture it as the Atlantic, which today is between Brazil and Liberia and between North America and North Africa.

Earth probably had a larger ocean at one point, but it wasn't defined by continents. After Earth was formed, it had oceans but no continents, according to the Encyclopedia of Science. It would mean the ocean spanned more than twenty thousand miles of Earth's equator and more than fifty million square miles of Earth's surface.

The waters of the world ocean are considered to be a single "world ocean" by scientists. Murphy said that the Atlantic and the Pacific intersect at the bottom of South America and beneath Africa.

The Pacific has been the world's largest ocean since Pangaea's death around 200 million years ago. If current projections are correct, Australia will split the Pacific in two over the next 70 million years. The Atlantic will become the largest ocean in the world.

It was originally published on Live Science