Point Nemo: The Most Remote Place on Earth Where You Are Closer to Astronauts in Space Than to Any Human on Land

There is a point in the South Pacific Ocean, at coordinates 48 degrees south latitude and 123 degrees west longitude, where if you were standing in a boat, the nearest human beings would not be on any shore. They would be above you, in the International Space Station, orbiting at 250 miles up. The ISS passes within about 258 miles of the point during its orbit. The nearest land in any direction is 1,670 miles away.

This place is called Point Nemo, and it is officially the most remote location on Earth. A Croatian-Canadian engineer named Hrvoje Lukatela worked out the coordinates in 1992 using specialized geodetic software. He named it Point Nemo because Nemo means “no one” in Latin.

What Makes It the Most Remote

The oceanic pole of inaccessibility is the point on any body of water farthest from any landmass. Point Nemo is that point on Earth’s ocean. It occupies an equal distance of approximately 1,670 miles from three reference points: Ducie Atoll in the Pitcairn Islands to the north, Moto Nui near Easter Island to the northeast, and Maher Island off the coast of Antarctica to the south.

The geometry is precise. If you moved Point Nemo in any direction, you would get closer to one of those three landmasses. It is the solution to a specific mathematical problem: find the point on Earth’s surface, within the ocean, that maximizes the distance to any land. Lukatela was the first person to solve this problem rigorously.

The surrounding area is also remarkable for what it lacks. Point Nemo sits inside the South Pacific Gyre, a rotating system of ocean currents that creates one of the most biologically empty regions on Earth. The gyre prevents nutrient-rich water from mixing into the region from surrounding areas. The result is that the water around Point Nemo is extraordinarily clear and extraordinarily empty. Almost nothing lives there. No shipping routes pass through it. No commercial flights cross it. The area experiences essentially no human presence and almost no biological activity.

Additionally, Point Nemo sits in what oceanographers describe as one of the most isolated weather systems on the planet. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current surrounds the broader region, generating some of the most extreme ocean conditions on Earth. Waves in the Southern Ocean around Point Nemo can reach 50 feet or higher. The weather is brutal and the currents are powerful and there is simply nothing to sail to.

The Spacecraft Graveyard

Because Point Nemo is so remote, so far from shipping lanes, so far from inhabited coastlines, and so biologically inert, space agencies have been using it as a controlled crash site for decades. When a satellite or space station reaches the end of its operational life, engineers can program it to deorbit in a controlled fashion and crash into the ocean at Point Nemo rather than in any populated area or active maritime zone.

Since 1971, more than 263 spacecraft have been intentionally crashed here. The list includes Russian Mir space station, which operated from 1986 to 2001 and was one of the most significant structures humanity ever put in orbit. It crashed into the South Pacific near Point Nemo in March 2001 in a controlled deorbit. Several Salyut stations are down there. Dozens of Russian Progress cargo craft. European Space Agency Automated Transfer Vehicles. Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicles. Pieces of space history in various states of disintegration, spread across the ocean floor at a depth of roughly 13,000 feet.

The International Space Station is scheduled to end there too. NASA and its international partners plan to deorbit the ISS in 2030. The station will break apart during reentry, and the surviving pieces will crash into the South Pacific near Point Nemo. The largest structure humanity has ever assembled in space will join the graveyard on the ocean floor.

The Bloop

In 1997, NOAA hydrophone arrays in the South Pacific picked up an extraordinarily powerful low-frequency sound. The hydrophones exist to monitor for underwater nuclear tests and other acoustic events. The sound they detected in 1997 was, at the time, the loudest sound of unknown origin ever recorded. The monitoring system gave it the name “The Bloop.”

The Bloop was detected near the coordinates of Point Nemo. It was loud enough to be picked up by sensors more than 3,000 miles apart. Its frequency profile did not match any known human-made source. Naturally, speculation about the source ran wide.

Scientists eventually concluded that The Bloop was most likely the sound of icequake activity, large ice sheets cracking and calving near Antarctica. The acoustic properties matched known icequake signatures once researchers had better comparison data. The explanation is solid and unsurprising given Point Nemo’s location between the deep ocean and Antarctica.

Still, for a few years, the loudest mystery sound in the ocean was coming from the most remote place on Earth. That combination produced a specific cultural moment. H.P. Lovecraft had placed his fictional sunken city of R’lyeh, home to the sleeping cosmic entity Cthulhu, at coordinates remarkably close to Point Nemo in his 1928 story “The Call of Cthulhu.” Whether Lovecraft chose that location deliberately or accidentally is not known. The overlap of the actual mystery sound with the fictional monster’s address generated significant internet discussion.