Want to get away from everyone? Like, literally. Everyone.
There may be no better place on Earth than Point Nemo.
Hidden deep in the South Pacific, Point Nemo is the planet’s “oceanic pole of inaccessibility”—the spot in the ocean farther from land than anywhere else. It sits roughly 1,670 miles from the nearest landmass in every direction.
As a recent Instagram post from Atlas Obscura puts it: “In the middle of the South Pacific is a place so remote that astronauts aboard the International Space Station can sometimes be closer than people on land.”
That’s not hyperbole.
When the ISS passes directly overhead at roughly 250 miles above Earth, its astronauts are dramatically closer than Point Nemo’s nearest land, 1,670 miles away.
And there isn’t even anything there.
“No beacon or anchored marker. Just vast expanses of open ocean,” Atlas Obscura explains. The location wasn’t even calculated until 1992, when Croatian-Canadian survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela used computer software to pinpoint it. He named it after Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
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Its isolation has given Point Nemo another nickname: the Spacecraft Cemetery.
Nearly 300 decommissioned spacecraft have been deliberately brought down in the broader region, including Russia’s Mir space station, because falling debris is extraordinarily unlikely to hit anyone.
Then things get creepy.
In H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 The Call of Cthulhu, the sunken nightmare city of R’lyeh sits at coordinates only about 205 miles from Point Nemo. Lovecraft chose them more than 60 years before Point Nemo was actually identified.
And then came the Bloop.
In 1997, NOAA hydrophones thousands of miles apart picked up an incredibly loud, ultra-low-frequency noise in the South Pacific. Speculation naturally ran wild—especially among Lovecraft fans—but NOAA eventually determined the culprit was an icequake, created as Antarctic ice cracked and broke apart.
People do occasionally venture there.
Explorer Chris Brown documented an expedition from Chile across Point Nemo toward French Polynesia, where his team jumped into the ocean for what they called the “most remote swim ever recorded.”
Imagine that for a moment.
You’re floating in open water, more than 1,600 miles from land. The nearest humans might be in space. And somewhere beneath you is a graveyard of fallen spacecraft.
Comforting.
Welcome to Point Nemo, one of the strangest and creepiest places on Earth.
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