We all get that feeling every now and then: we’re stressed out by our everyday lives, work is giving us agita, you’re losing sleep over school, and if you spend one more minute stuck in your daily commute, you’ll want to start exploring ways through the other cars instead of past them. The good news is that, if you want to get as far from people as you possibly can for a little while, I know exactly the place for you!
Now, the bad news is there’s not a whole lot to see there. There’s not even any land. We’re not even sure any humans have ever passed through here, intentionally or otherwise. In fact, it’s as far from land as you can get while staying on the planet: Point Nemo (officially known as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility) is a location in the South Pacific about 1,670 miles from the nearest land (or 2,688 km for those of you who do that).
Its coordinates, in case you want to look it up yourself on Google Maps, are 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W. Go ahead and click on that and see how far you have to zoom out to see land. In fact, Point Nemo is so far from land that, when it passes overhead, the closest humans are on the International Space Station.
The area around Point Nemo is actually a pretty popular destination for spacecraft returning to Earth: given that the relevant space agencies wouldn’t want a spacecraft crashing into anyplace that’s inhabited, or any ships that happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the waters of the South Pacific are so vast and so far from civilization that they make an ideal place for those craft to go. Literally hundreds of spacecraft, satellites, and even space stations have wound up underwater in Point Nemo’s neighborhood, and even the aforementioned ISS is planned to come down there in the early 2030s.