The Loneliest Place on Earth

Point Nemo, meaning no man's land in Latin, is considered the "extremity of the ocean" and is nothing more than a desert in the middle of the sea.

People often refer vaguely to “nowhere,” but it turns out scientists have actually figured out exactly where that point is.

With a distance of 2,250 km from the nearest land, Point Nemo, meaning no man's land in Latin, is the most remote place on Earth, so far from human civilization that the people who "live" closest to this area are scientists on the International Space Station (ISS).

Point Nemo is located in the southern Pacific Ocean . Photo: Wikimedia.

Due to its isolated location, Point Nemo is an ideal place for spacecraft to crash after their missions. Since its inception in 1971, Point Nemo has been the resting place for more than 270 spacecraft from NASA and other space agencies.

"Desert in the middle of the ocean"

All That's Interesting calls Point Nemo the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” or the farthest ocean coordinate from land. Point Nemo is literally in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by more than 1,000 miles of ocean in every direction.

The closest lands to Point Nemo are also some of the most remote and rugged islands in the world . These include Pitcairn Island, a British overseas territory and the country's last land in the Pacific Ocean, and Easter Island (Chile).

There are no inhabitants near Point Nemo. Therefore, scientists chose to name this place “Nemo”, Latin for “no one”, inspired by Captain Nemo’s submarine in the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by author Jules Verne.

Point Nemo means "no man's land" in Latin. This is an invisible point in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by Australia, South America and New Zealand. Photo: The Sun.

The closest people to this area are scientists on the International Space Station (ISS). When flying over Point Nemo, the ISS is 360 km from Earth, much closer than any island on the planet's surface.

Even the person who first calculated the exact location of Point Nemo never visited it.

Specifically, the first person to find the location of Point Nemo was Hrvoje Lukatela, a Canadian-Croatian geodetic engineer. He used software to calculate the coordinates with the greatest distance from 3 equally spaced points, thereby finding the location of Point Nemo in 1992 without having to go there.

According to Live Science , the program calculated the coordinates as the greatest distance from three equally spaced land coordinates. Therefore, it is very likely that no human has ever passed through the exact coordinates of Point Nemo.

Not only humans, the marine ecosystem here is also very poor in diversity. Due to the nature of ocean currents, this area is scarce in marine life, there are no fishing boats because of low nutrients.

Motu Nui, one of the islands closest to Point Nemo. Photo: Flickr.

Without any food source, sustaining life on Point Nemo in the middle of the vast ocean is nearly impossible.

"We were surprised to find that the cell count in the South Pacific is about a third lower than in the Atlantic gyre. This is probably the ocean region with the lowest cell count at the surface," said marine microbiologist Bernhard Fuchs of the Max Planck Institute for Oceanography in Germany after the trip in late 2015.

The mysteries surrounding Point Nemo

Vice describes Point Nemo as “the least biologically active part of the world’s oceans.” Yet scientists were surprised when, in 1997, they discovered one of the loudest underwater sounds ever recorded near its oceanic tip.

A loud noise was heard about 2,000 km east of Point Nemo. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) couldn't think of anything big enough to make such a loud sound underwater, so they called it "The Bloop".

Writer HP Lovecraft placed the home of the legendary monster Cthulhu in his work close to the coordinates of Point Nemo in 1928, 66 years before Lukatela calculated Nemo's location. Photo: Wikimedia.

The agency later concluded that it was simply the sound of ice cracking in Antarctica. However, science fiction enthusiasts were quick to come up with another explanation.

They cite that when writer H.P. Lovecraft first introduced readers to his famous tentacled monster in The Call of Cthulhu , he wrote that the creature's lair was the lost city of R'yleh in the South Pacific.

Coincidentally, R'yleh's coordinates are surprisingly close to Point Nemo's coordinates, which is also where "The Bloop" appears.

Lovecraft first wrote about his sea monster in 1928, 66 years before Lukatela calculated Nemo's location. Because of this, some have speculated that the "mid-ocean desert" is actually home to some undiscovered creature.

With no life nearby, Point Nemo is an ideal place for spacecraft to crash after their missions. Since its use in 1971, Point Nemo has become the "resting place" for more than 270 spacecraft from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and several space organizations.

The International Space Station (ISS) will likely be brought to Point Nemo in 2024. Photo: NBC News.

Over the 45 years from 1971 to 2016, space agencies around the world landed 260 pieces of space junk in this area. For large objects like China’s Tiangong-1 space station, which returned to Earth in 2018, the debris could stretch across an area of ocean as long as 1,600 kilometers.

The largest structure ever to fall at Point Nemo was the Russian Space Research Laboratory (MIR) weighing about 120 tons, which fell in 2001 after 15 years of operation.

Many other spacecraft also "rest" at Point Nemo, such as the European Space Agency's transport ships, Japan's HTV cargo ship and more than 140 Russian supply ships.

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