Point Nemo

The nearest people are usually the ones in orbit above it

Point Nemo is the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the place in the sea farthest from any land, at roughly 48°52.6′S, 123°23.6′W in the South Pacific. It lies about 2,688 km from the three nearest specks of land, all equally distant: Pandora Islet on Ducie Atoll in the Pitcairn Islands to the north, Motu Nui off Easter Island to the northeast, and Maher Island off Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica, to the south. Because those islands have never been surveyed precisely enough, its exact position is still not known.

Nobody had to go there to find it. The Croatian survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela calculated the point in 1992 with computer software and a digital chart of the world, and recalculated it in 2022 using OpenStreetMap and Google Maps data. He named it after Captain Nemo of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, a childhood favourite; nemo is also Latin for nobody. Long before that, in 1928, H. P. Lovecraft had set the sunken city of R'lyeh from The Call of Cthulhu in this region of the ocean.

No regular shipping lane or air route comes within 400 km, so at times the nearest human beings are the astronauts aboard the International Space Station as it passes overhead. The water itself is close to empty. The point sits inside the South Pacific Gyre, a current that steers nutrient-rich water away, and so far from land that little run-off reaches it, making it one of the most lifeless stretches of ocean on Earth. Even so, it is not clean: water sampled near Point Nemo by boats in the Volvo Ocean Race held up to 26 particles of microplastic per cubic metre.

Its emptiness has given it a second career as the spacecraft cemetery. Hundreds of decommissioned satellites, space stations and other spacecraft have been steered down into the surrounding sea on re-entry, to keep their wreckage away from people and shipping, and the ocean floor there is littered with space debris. The International Space Station itself is planned to make its final plunge into the ocean near Point Nemo in 2031. On land, its opposite point on the globe lies in the Aktobe Region of western Kazakhstan, about 50 km south-southeast of the town of Shubarkuduk.