Point Nemo
What’s the most remote thing on Earth?
One way to measure this is to figure out the point in the ocean that’s the farthest from land. Virtually everyone on Earth identifies with a landmass, and there’s a spot in the South Pacific Ocean that’s farther from land than anywhere else.
It’s called Point Nemo, and I could spend some time explaining that the closest land masses are Motu Nui of Easter Island to the northeast, and Maher Island (off the coast of Antarctica) to the south, and that it’s almost equally distant from South America, Australia, and New Zealand. I could describe that these are thousands of miles away, comparable to the distance between Moscow and London, but this image probably does a better job than most words:
You might think its remoteness would mean that it has remained relatively untouched by humans, but this very attribute has made it an appealing target for NASA and other space agencies to use for reentering spacecraft.
This has caused Point Nemo to also be dubbed a spacecraft cemetery. If you’re envisioning ghostly former space stations haunting anglerfish at the bottom, you might not be too far from the truth.
Most large objects out in space that are orbiting the Earth need to enter their lives by reentering our atmosphere and crashing down somewhere. They’re not smart drones capable of finding a place to land, but more like carefully calibrated bowling balls designed to land accurately. They go where they must go according to the laws of physics.
Most of these 3D-space bowling balls are going to crash down into Point Nemo, and plenty have already. The most famous of these is the Russian Mir space station, deliberately crash-landed (more like steadily disintegrated) in 2001. The large parts of Mir almost certainly ended up here.
Cargo ships that have transported things to the ISS have ended their lives at Point Nemo. Even a few ATVs and the like, along with various satellites and space-junk, ultimately became residents of Point Nemo.
Even if there wasn’t a chance of impact from a spacecraft, it’s really unlikely that a commercial or travel ship would come anywhere near Point Nemo. There’s just no economic incentive to go out of your way to get to this particular point of the ocean, so it’s ideal for the spacecraft cemetery idea.
I’ve probably convinced you by now that life finds a way everywhere on Earth, and that includes Point Nemo. You can read about the life that exists all the way at the bottom, where the pressure is powerful enough to crush a car, if you’d like:
There's Some Lovely Filth Down Here
Have you ever gone swimming in a place where you can go pretty deep, and tried to go down as far as you could? Some pools go down as much as 4 or 5 meters, or about 15 feet.
However, there’s a strong current here, and the area is tantamount to a biological desert. The currents keep nutrients from piling up, so it’s really tough for even the toughest animal life to take root here.
It really does seem remote, doesn’t it?
"What¨s the farthest point away from us that we'll never really visit? Let's just dump all of our large trash out there," classic humans.
Far out!