There is a spot in the South Pacific where, if you were treading water, the nearest human beings would usually not be on any shore or ship — they would be overhead, drifting past on the International Space Station some 400 kilometres up. The nearest land, by contrast, lies about 2,700 kilometres away in three directions. The place is called Point Nemo, and it is the most remote spot on the surface of the Earth's oceans: the point in the sea furthest from any coastline anywhere.
Formally it is the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, and it was located surprisingly recently. In 1992 Hrvoje Lukatela, a Croatian-born survey engineer working in Canada, used geodetic software to find the point equidistant from the three nearest scraps of land: Ducie Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn group to the north; Motu Nui, an islet off Easter Island to the north-east; and Maher Island off the coast of Antarctica to the south. Each is roughly 2,688 kilometres away. Lukatela named his discovery after Captain Nemo, the submarine recluse of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — a fitting double meaning, since nemo is Latin for "no one".
The loneliest water
Point Nemo sits inside the South Pacific Gyre, a vast, slowly rotating desert of ocean. The spinning currents block nutrient-rich water from mixing in, and the site is so far from land that almost no organic matter drifts out to it, which makes these among the least biologically productive waters on the planet. The seabed below is not lifeless — bacteria and other hardy organisms persist — but there are no fishing grounds worth the diesel, and shipping lanes give the whole region a wide berth. The humans who pass closest on the surface are usually competitors in round-the-world yacht races, whose southern routes slice through the gyre; even they see it only as empty grey water, indistinguishable from the thousands of kilometres of empty grey water on either side. For everyone else the neighbourhood is simply a blank: which is exactly why one industry finds it invaluable.
The spacecraft cemetery
When a large satellite or space station reaches the end of its life, controllers steer it into a destructive plunge through the atmosphere — but chunks of tank, truss and titanium survive the fireball, and they have to land somewhere. The waters around Point Nemo, remote, roughly four kilometres deep and almost untrafficked, have become the world's spacecraft cemetery: the one address on Earth where a shower of falling metal endangers essentially no one. Since the early 1970s, space agencies have aimed hundreds of retiring craft at this stretch of the South Pacific: Soviet-era Salyut stations, fleets of uncrewed Progress cargo ships, Japanese and European supply vehicles among them. The most famous arrival came in 2001, when Russia deorbited the 120-tonne Mir space station and its glowing fragments streaked over the Pacific into the designated zone. The International Space Station itself — the very outpost whose crew are so often Point Nemo's nearest neighbours — is planned to make the same one-way journey when it is finally retired, the largest object ever brought down from orbit. There is a certain symmetry in that: the station ending its days in the one patch of ocean that has watched it pass overhead more closely than any human ever could.
The area has a talent for legend, too. In his 1928 story The Call of Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft placed R'lyeh, the sunken city where his tentacled god lies dreaming, at coordinates in the South Pacific strikingly close to the spot Lukatela would calculate more than sixty years later — a coincidence, but one that delights horror fans. And in 1997 American ocean hydrophones picked up an extraordinarily loud low-frequency sound, nicknamed the Bloop, from the general region. For a few years it fuelled talk of unknown sea monsters; researchers eventually matched its signature to icequakes — the cracking and calving of Antarctic ice — rather than anything with tentacles.
Pub-quiz pedants should note the distinction with Point Nemo's terrestrial twin: the continental pole of inaccessibility, the point on land furthest from any ocean, which lies in the deserts of far north-western China, near the Kazakh border. One point is defined by the absence of land, the other by the absence of sea; both are records of pure distance.
Nothing lives large at Point Nemo, nothing is mined there, and no flag flies over it. Its entire significance is an absence — the greatest possible distance from us. We have found only two uses for such purity of remoteness: we tell monster stories about it, and we use it as a graveyard for the machines we once flung at the stars.
Quiz nuggets
- Point Nemo, the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, lies roughly 2,700 kilometres from the nearest land in any direction.
- It was calculated in 1992 by survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela and named after Jules Verne's Captain Nemo — Latin for "no one".
- The three nearest scraps of land are Ducie Island, Motu Nui near Easter Island, and Antarctica's Maher Island.
- Russia's 120-tonne Mir space station was deorbited into the surrounding spacecraft cemetery in 2001.
- Lovecraft's 1928 story placed the sunken city of R'lyeh near Point Nemo's coordinates — 64 years before they were calculated.