Where is the most remote place in the ocean?
At Point Nemo in the South Pacific, the nearest land is 2,688 km away, and the closest humans are often astronauts flying overhead.
▶ Start the storyThe most remote place in the ocean is Point Nemo, in the South Pacific. It is the spot farthest from any land: the three nearest specks of land, an islet in the Pitcairn Islands, a rock next to Easter Island and an island off Antarctica, are each about 2,688 kilometres away. Geographers call such a spot a pole of inaccessibility, the point hardest to reach from a boundary, here the coastline.
2,688 km
It is so isolated that no regular shipping or air routes pass within 400 kilometres. When the International Space Station flies over, the closest humans to Point Nemo are often the astronauts on board. Even life is scarce: the swirling current of the South Pacific Gyre blocks nutrients, and there is no land nearby to wash any in.
Point Nemo was first pinpointed in 1992 by a Croatian survey engineer, Hrvoje Lukatela. He named it after Captain Nemo, from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, one of his childhood favourite books. Fittingly, "nemo" is Latin for "nobody".
That emptiness makes it useful. Space agencies steer big spacecraft that are too large to burn up on re-entry to crash in the ocean around Point Nemo, where falling debris will not hurt anyone. At least 264 spacecraft ended there between 1971 and 2016, including the Russian space station Mir, and the International Space Station is planned to join them in 2031.
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Recap
The farthest point from land is where three circles around the three nearest islands meet, and it is where spacecraft go to die.
Surprising fact · It was named in 1992 after Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, and 'nemo' is Latin for 'nobody'.
Connects to
- Spacecraft cemetery
- South pacific gyre
- Twenty thousand leagues under the seas
- International space station
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (16 claims) cites at least one of these.