The oceanic pole of inaccessibility: the point in the sea furthest from any land, about 2,688 km from the nearest three, which are Ducie Island in the Pitcairns, Motu Nui off Easter Island, and Maher Island off Antarctica. The Croatian engineer Hrvoje Lukatela calculated it in 1992 and named it for Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, which also happens to be Latin for nobody. Two things make it worth knowing. It is the spacecraft cemetery: hundreds of dead satellites and stations have been deliberately de-orbited to fall here because nothing is underneath, and the International Space Station is scheduled to come down here in 2031. And with no shipping lane or flight path within 400 km, whenever the ISS passes overhead the nearest human beings to this spot are in orbit, not on the water.
South Pacific Ocean
See it on the map
