Point Nemo, where spacecraft go to die
There is a spot in the Pacific so remote that the nearest humans are often the astronauts passing overhead.
Draw circles around the three nearest specks of land, Ducie Island (Pitcairn Islands), Motu Nui (near Easter Island) and Maher Island (Antarctica), and they meet at one point in the South Pacific: 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W. That is Point Nemo, about 2,688 km from the nearest shore.
The location was calculated in 1992 by the Croatian-Canadian survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela using computer geometry. It was named after Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Nemo is Latin for “no one”.
Closer to space than to land
The International Space Station orbits at about 400 km. When it passes over, the astronauts are the nearest humans to Point Nemo by a wide margin.
The spacecraft cemetery
Because nobody lives nearby and few ships pass, space agencies aim falling spacecraft at the surrounding region. Hundreds of objects have been deliberately sunk there, including the Mir space station in 2001. The ISS is planned to follow at the end of its life.
H. P. Lovecraft placed the sunken city of R’lyeh, where Cthulhu lies dreaming, in the same remote stretch of ocean in 1928, decades before anyone calculated the point.
Bring it up
“There’s a place in the Pacific where the closest people to you are usually the astronauts on the space station.”
Follow the thread
- In contrastThe traveller who went five times farther than Marco Polo The most connected traveller of his age, and the least connected place on Earth.
- RelatedKiribati moved the International Date Line The remote central Pacific, where nations are mostly ocean.
- RelatedThe Pale Blue Dot Both change your sense of scale: one looks at Earth from space, the other at the place on Earth farthest from anyone.
