Remote places

Point Nemo: the place farthest from land

There is a spot in the South Pacific where the nearest land is 2,688 km away in every direction. When the space station passes over it, the closest human beings are above you rather than beside you.

· 2 min read

Diagram of Point Nemo with the three nearest islands, each 2,688 km away
Three scraps of land sit exactly the same distance away. Nothing else is closer.

The oceanic pole of inaccessibility

Point Nemo lies at about 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W. It is the point in the world ocean farthest from any coast, and it was not found by sailing to it. In 1992 the survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela worked it out geometrically, and recalculated it in 2022 with better data. The name is a nod to Jules Verne's Captain Nemo.

Three pieces of land tie for nearest, each about 2,688 km away: Pandora Islet on Ducie Island in the Pitcairn group to the north, Motu Nui next to Easter Island to the northeast, and Maher Island off Antarctica to the south.

The nearest people are often overhead

There are no shipping lanes and no flight paths nearby. The International Space Station orbits about 400 km up, so when it passes over Point Nemo the astronauts on board are far closer to that patch of water than anyone on a boat or an island. The distance to the nearest land is nearly seven times the distance to space.

The water itself is unusually empty. Point Nemo sits inside the South Pacific Gyre, a slow swirl of water that gets almost no nutrients from land or upwelling, which makes it one of the least productive stretches of ocean anywhere.

Where spacecraft go to die

Being far from everyone makes it useful. Space agencies aim decommissioned satellites and cargo ships at this region so that whatever survives re-entry lands where it cannot hurt anybody. Hundreds of craft have come down here, including the Russian space station Mir in 2001. The International Space Station is planned to follow it, around 2031.

What is on the other side

Dig straight down from Point Nemo and you would come out in Kazakhstan, near 48.9°N 56.6°E. That is unusual. Most of the ocean has ocean on the far side too, and only about 15% of land has land opposite it. The most remote water on the planet happens to line up with dry ground.

Try it on the globe and see for yourself, or read more about antipodes and how the pairs work out.

Point Nemo in numbers

  • Position: about 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W
  • Distance to the nearest land: about 2,688 km, in three directions at once
  • Distance to the space station passing overhead: about 400 km
  • Calculated: 1992, by Hrvoje Lukatela, and revised in 2022

Sources

Keep digging

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