If you’re on a ship passing through Point Nemo, it’s likely that the closest other human beings are on the International Space Station.
You know those days where you just want to be alone? When everything and everyone is grinding your gears for no particular reason, and you just can’t be far enough away from everyone’s stinky breath, annoying quirks, and stupid mouth-breathing? Oh, do I have the place for you! It’s called the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility” and it’s literally the farthest place on earth from anything else. It’s so far away that it’s often the case that astronauts aboard the International Space Station are the closest human beings. While the Space Station is only around 260 miles up, the closest (inhabited) chunk of earth is nearly 2,000 miles away.
Most of the time, the oceanic pole of inaccessibility is called Point Nemo, named after ol’ man Verne’s guy. Nemo, in Latin, means nobody, which is fitting since nobody is ever even remotely close to it. Considering the fact that Point Nemo is just over 1,000 miles from the coasts of three islands in the middle of the South Pacific, sitting equidistant from one of the Easter Islands, one of the Pitcairn Islands, and a tiny speck of land just off Antarctica called Maher Island, Point Nemo is the perfect moniker.
“The location of three equilateral points is quite unique, and there are no other points on the Earth’s surface that could conceivably replace any one of those,” Hrvoje Lukatela, an engineer who officially discovered the place in 1992, told BBC. “It is possible that better measurements, or coastal erosion, would shift the location of Point Nemo, “but only in the order of metres.”
So what, if anything, lives in this strange little place? Well, according to researchers, barely anything. Not only is it incredibly far away from anything, it is nearly void of life. Sitting within a massive rotating current known as the South Pacific Gyre (yeah, those are the things that create massive floating garbage patches), the water at Point Nemo is basically cut off from nutrient-heavy water that, in other places, would be circulated in. Since the area is so far away from land, there’s almost nothing worth eating in the wind, either.
“As a result, there is little to feed anything,” wrote Ella Davies for BBC. “With no material falling from above as ‘marine snow’, the seafloor is also lifeless.” Steven D’Hondt, an oceanographer from the University of Rhode Island, called it “the least biologically active region of the world ocean.”
So what have humans decided to do with this truly unique spot on the globe? Dump our trash, of course! Since it’s so far away from, well, everything, it’s the perfect place for Russia, Japan, and Europe to throw out their busted up old spaceships. “Over a hundred decommissioned spacecraft are thought to now occupy this ‘spacecraft cemetery’,” Davies continued, “from satellites and cargo ships to the defunct space station Mir.”
Also included in the stuff floating around at the farthest point from anywhere on earth is a big patch of floating litter—plastic, polystyrene, and the like. So while the oceanic pole of inaccessibility might be the perfect place to get away from all the clutter of everyday life, it’s still infected with the offal of everyday life.
