Every child with a spade has heard the promise: dig straight down through the garden and keep going, and you will come out in China. It is one of geography's most durable myths, and for almost everyone who repeats it, it is wrong. Tunnel through the centre of the Earth from Britain and you surface in the cold Southern Ocean south-east of New Zealand, near a cluster of uninhabited rocks that are actually named the Antipodes Islands. From most of the United States you emerge in the empty Indian Ocean. The only people who can genuinely dig to China are on the far side of the world from it — in Chile and Argentina, where the trick works almost perfectly.
The antipode of any point is the spot diametrically opposite it on the globe: flip the latitude from north to south, and shift the longitude halfway round. The rule is simple enough to run in your head — London sits at about 51.5 degrees north on the Greenwich meridian, so its antipode lies at 51.5 degrees south on the 180th meridian, deep in open water. The reason the digging game so rarely pays off is a lopsidedness in how the planet's land is arranged. About 71 per cent of Earth's surface is ocean, so any random point's opposite number is likely to be wet; worse, the continents happen to be bunched in a way that places most land opposite sea. Do the sums and the result is striking: only around 15 per cent of the world's land is antipodal to other land. The rest — the great majority of every continent — faces open water on the far side of the planet.
A hemisphere of water
Geographers formalise this lopsidedness by splitting the globe into a land hemisphere and a water hemisphere. Centre a hemisphere near Nantes, in western France, and you capture the largest possible share of the world's land — yet even this land hemisphere is nearly half ocean. Its opposite, centred near New Zealand, is almost nine-tenths water. The Pacific is the chief culprit: it is so vast that it lies opposite not only the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean but, in places, opposite itself — there are points in the mid-Pacific whose antipodes are also in the Pacific.
The matches that do exist make excellent quiz material. The Iberian peninsula lines up with New Zealand: Madrid's antipode falls in the North Island countryside, and Christchurch sits nearly opposite the Galician city of A Coruña. Beijing's opposite point lies in Argentina, not far from Bahía Blanca — which is why the digging myth works in reverse for Argentine children. Honolulu is roughly antipodal to the borderlands of Botswana and Namibia. Singapore and Quito, both sitting almost on the equator, are near-perfect opposites. And in a coincidence collectors cherish, Taiwan — once known to Europeans as Formosa — lies roughly opposite the Argentine province of Formosa; the names are unrelated, the alignment pure accident.
Opposite feet
The word itself is older than the map. Antipodes is Greek for opposite feet — the people who, if they existed, would stand sole-to-sole with you through the planet. Classical and medieval scholars argued in earnest about whether such people could exist at all; some churchmen dismissed the idea as absurd, reasoning that no descendants of Adam could have crossed the impassable torrid zone to get there. When British navigators charted the islands south-east of New Zealand around 1800, they named them the Antipodes Islands because they lay nearly opposite Greenwich — as close to London's mirror point as dry land gets. From there the word slid into everyday speech: Britons still call Australia and New Zealand the Antipodes, although the label is only half deserved, since almost all of Australia is actually antipodal to the North Atlantic rather than to Britain.
Antipodal pairs share a set of tidy properties that quizzes adore. When it is midsummer noon at one, it is close to midwinter midnight at the other — seasons and clocks both inverted. And because the Earth's circumference is roughly 40,000 kilometres, no two places on the surface can be more than about 20,000 kilometres apart; the longest journey you could ever need to make is to your own antipode, and no scheduled airline has ever flown a true antipode-to-antipode route nonstop. All of which is a better answer for the child with the spade than a flat no: dig deep enough and you do not reach China — you reach the opposite of everything.
Quiz nuggets
- Only around 15 per cent of the world's land lies opposite other land; most antipodes fall in ocean.
- Britain's antipodes lie near New Zealand's Antipodes Islands, named around 1800 for sitting nearly opposite Greenwich.
- Digging straight through to China genuinely works from parts of Chile and Argentina.
- Madrid's antipode is in New Zealand's North Island, while Christchurch lies nearly opposite A Coruña in Spain.
- The word antipodes comes from the Greek for opposite feet.