The Most Remote Spot in the Ocean Is Where Spacecraft Go to Die

The point in the ocean farthest from any landmass sits at 48°52.6′S, 123°23.6′W, in the South Pacific. The closest land in any direction is 2,688 kilometers away — Ducie Island to the north, Motu Nui near Easter Island to the northeast, and Maher Island off Antarctica to the south. Hrvoje Lukatela, a Croatian survey engineer working in Calgary, calculated the location in 1992 using a geodesic algorithm of his own design. He named it Point Nemo, after Jules Verne's submarine captain.

The waters around the point are biological desert. The South Pacific Gyre rotates slowly here, isolating the surface from coastal nutrient flows; chlorophyll concentrations are among the lowest measured anywhere in the open ocean. There are no fishing fleets. There is, on most days, no one within a thousand kilometers. When the International Space Station is overhead, the astronauts at 400 km altitude are usually the closest humans in any direction.

That solitude is what makes Point Nemo useful. Since the 1970s, space agencies have used the surrounding region — a roughly elliptical 'Spacecraft Cemetery' — as the re-entry corridor for vehicles too large to burn up cleanly. NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, and ESA have steered more than 260 retired spacecraft into the area, including the Mir station in 2001 and a long line of Progress and HTV cargo vehicles. The ISS itself is scheduled for a Point Nemo deorbit around 2031.

In 2016, hydrophones moored in the area recorded a strange repeating low-frequency thrum that the press dubbed 'the bloop's quieter cousin.' NOAA traced it to ice cracking in the West Antarctic. Even the loneliest place on Earth is not actually quiet.