Point Nemo, in the South Pacific, is the spot on Earth's ocean farthest from any shore. Draw a circle around it and exactly three specks of land touch the rim — and nothing breaks the water inside.
2,688 km
to the nearest land in any direction · 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W · NOAA
That is roughly the distance from London to Istanbul, with no island, reef or rock in between. Computed by Croatian-Canadian engineer Hrvoje Lukatela in 1992 and named after Jules Verne's Captain Nemo — Latin for "no one".
3equidistant islands on the rim
~402 kmISS altitude: often the nearest people
260+spacecraft sunk nearby, 1971–2016
deeper blue = farther from land (schematic)landspacecraft cemetery, approx.
01 · The geometry
Three shores, one circle
Point Nemo is defined by a tie: it is the only spot equally far from three pieces of land, with no land closer.
Lukatela found it by computer, working from a global coastline dataset. Two of the three rim points are nearly uninhabited: Ducie is an atoll in the Pitcairn group; Motu Nui is a rock off Easter Island. The third is an ice-bound island on the Antarctic coast. On the map the dashed spokes are all exactly the same length — that is the whole definition.
Bearings from Point Nemo · distances per NOAA National Ocean Service
02 · Remoteness
Closer to space than to shore
When the International Space Station passes over, its crew is the nearest humanity to Point Nemo — about 402 km up, versus 2,688 km to the nearest land.
The land has a pole of its own: the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility, in China's Xinjiang region, is 2,510 ± 10 km from the nearest sea. The ocean's version is a little farther from anything.
Because almost no one is there, space agencies aim retired spacecraft at the ocean around Point Nemo.
One compiled tally counts more than 260 spacecraft sent to this "spacecraft cemetery" between 1971 and 2016, mostly Russian. Mir was brought down there on March 23, 2001. The biggest burial is still to come: NASA has hired SpaceX (a contract worth up to $843 million) to build a deorbit vehicle that will steer the 420-tonne ISS into a remote stretch of ocean around 2030.
260+craft, 1971–2016 (compiled tally)
2001Mir deorbited, Mar 23
$843MNASA deorbit-vehicle contract, max
Mir's mass is reported between ~120 and 135 t; the pale segment shows that range. ISS mass: NASA, without visiting vehicles.
04 · An ocean desert
The emptiest water on the planet
Point Nemo sits in the South Pacific Gyre, a slowly turning current system that keeps out nutrients. Very little lives there.
Its surface water is among the clearest ever measured, because there is almost no plankton to cloud it (Morel et al., 2007). Seafloor mud builds up at just 0.1–1 m per million years. Microbes revived from 101.5-million-year-old sediment here were still alive (Morono et al., 2020).
~10%of the ocean surface is inside the gyre
0.1–1 mof sediment per million years
101.5 Myrage of sediment that still held living microbes
*Area of a 2,688 km spherical cap on a 6,371 km Earth — our calculation. Gyre area as commonly cited; Russia area for scale.
05 · The scale of it
From the shoreline to nowhere
Distance from the nearest land, from 0 at the shore to 2,688 km at Point Nemo. The ISS marker shows how high the station flies, for comparison.
What to notice on the map
Isolation you can measure
"Remote" usually means far from people. Point Nemo is remote by a strict measure: it is as far as you can get from all land at once. That is why it is useful as a place to drop spacecraft, and why the ocean around it is so empty of life.
The circle is a real circle. The map uses an azimuthal equidistant projection centred on Nemo, so every straight line from the centre shows its true distance. On a Mercator map it would be stretched into an egg shape.
Three dots on the rim. Ducie, Motu Nui and Maher sit north, north-east and south. Push the centre in any direction and it moves closer to one of them.
The spacecraft cemetery sits off-centre, west of the point, in water that is almost as empty but not at the exact centre.
Nothing inside the circle. It covers about 22.4 million km², larger than Russia, without a single piece of land.