Point Nemo

Somewhere in the South Pacific lies the spot in Earth's oceans that is farthest from any land. It is called Point Nemo, after the Latin for "no one" and Jules Verne's reclusive submarine captain, and it sits about 2,688 kilometers from the nearest shore in three directions at once. No island, reef or rock breaks the horizon for days of sailing, and no regular shipping lanes or flight paths pass nearby. When the International Space Station flies overhead, roughly 400 kilometers up, its crew are often the closest human beings. That emptiness has made the surrounding waters the world's preferred graveyard for retired spacecraft, steered down to burn up and sink where they cannot hurt anyone.

Point Nemo lies at about 48°53′S 123°24′W, in the open South Pacific between New Zealand and South America. Three specks of land sit at almost exactly the same distance, roughly 2,688 kilometers away: Ducie Island in the Pitcairn Islands to the north, Motu Nui off Easter Island to the northeast, and Maher Island off Antarctica's Marie Byrd Land to the south. The point falls inside the South Pacific Gyre, a vast rotating current system that walls off nutrients, so the surface waters here are among the least biologically productive in any ocean. The seabed lies several kilometers down. Space agencies aim reentering spacecraft at a wide zone of open ocean around the point, often called the spacecraft cemetery.

The point is a product of computation rather than exploration. Croatian survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela located it in 1992 by running coastline data through geodesic software, and he recalculated it in 2022 with newer, satellite-derived maps. Because it is defined by the nearest coasts, small changes in mapped shorelines can nudge its position. The region was already in use as a disposal zone: Russia's Mir space station came down in the South Pacific in 2001, as have many cargo ships and rocket stages. NASA plans to steer the International Space Station into the same remote waters in the early 2030s using a dedicated deorbit vehicle. Fiction got there first, too. In 1928 H. P. Lovecraft placed the sunken city of R'lyeh in roughly this stretch of ocean.

• Challenger Deep
  The deepest known point in Earth's oceans, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench another ocean extreme
• Tristan da Cunha
  The remotest inhabited archipelago on Earth, part of a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic another remote place
• Pacific Ocean
  Earth's largest and deepest ocean located in
• Polynesia
  The many islands, and the greatest navigation feat in history nearest islands in
• Chile
  A ribbon of land between the Andes and the Pacific nearest land includes Easter Island, part of
• Antarctica
  The frozen continent at the bottom of the world nearest land to the south