Point Nemo

Smaller Territories (UK) / Pitcairn / Adamstown /
 interesting place, draw only border

The Oceanic Point of Inaccessibility,the farthest you can get from any piece of land.

As stated on the webpage www.geocuriosa.com/pointnemo/index.html

The name chosen for this point was "Point Nemo". Captain Nemo is a fictional hero of Jules Verne's "Vingt mille lieues sous les mers" ("Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1869): a romantic mixture of maritime exploration, technological wizardry and fearless resistance to the British Empire - such characters tend to remain indelible occupants of the memory of those that met them in the literature of their youth.

There is a number of different "landmass" data sources, all of some finite precision, and all burdened with some errors. The solution presented here is based on the data from a CD-based publication issued in July of 1992 under the name of 'Digital Chart of the World' (or DCW for short) - put together by what was, at the time, US Defense Mapping Agency (now NIMA) - with the cooperation of Australia, Canada and the UK. However, this data source has a number of errors and omissions, some of which have been corrected before the file was used for this computation.

The computation was done to a precision of better than 1mm (one millimeter, or about a twentieth of an inch). In reality, and given the fact that the exact location of the coastline is never surveyed with such high level of precision, is changing over time with both erosion and the continental drift and depends on the state of the tides, a precision of only about a meter or even a couple of meters would be more realistic. However, even if such lower precision was specified, the distances would still have to be computed as "geodesics" - mathematical lines of shortest distance between two points on the surface of an ellipsoid of rotation.

The geographic coordinates of the Point Nemo are:
s48:52:31.748 w123:23:33.069
This point is exactly 2 688 220.580 meters (slightly more than 1 450 nautical miles) away from the following three coastline points:
s24:40:39.360, w124:47:25.872 Ducie Island (Pitcairn Island Group, South Pacific)
s27:12:29.304, w109:27:33.120 Motu Nui / Rapa Nui ("Easter Island", South Pacific)
s72:57:57.024, w126:22:30.793 Maher Island / Siple Island (Antarctica)
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   48°52'0"S   123°22'58"W

Comments

  • They'll never find me here!
  • Interesting to read that inaccessibility is being mapped/researched. Thanks for showing!
  • I've been at this exact spot more than once. Quite daunting when you think about it.
  • سبحان الخالق سبحان الله سبحان المولى عز و جل
  • She is plastic beach
  • PLASTIC BEACH YEAAAH HAHAHAHAA
  • Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
  • Whales!
  • My own Floating Plastic Paradise. :-P
  • They didn't name it after Captain Nemo, don't really know why they would. It's actually latin for no one. Definitely makes more sense since there is no one around for miles upon miles.
  • Plastic Beach.
  • Satellites age or suffer from orbital decay so need to be brought down in a safe and controlled way so point Nemo is the perfect place for them to land - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul4QubV6g7w
  • YASS!!!!
  • That is why Nemo is Nemo (Latin for No one, so yes it is named after Captain Nemo
  • Show all comments
  •  2671 km
  •  2701 km
  •  4213 km
  •  4216 km
  •  4455 km
  •  5502 km
  •  5886 km
  •  5889 km
  •  5958 km
  •  6225 km
This article was last modified 16 years ago