Point Nemo

No, it’s not my hidden undersea lair from which my minions plot my megalomaniacal machinations. Nor is it some Vernesian secret society aiming to restore Victorian triumphalism throughout the globe. And it’s not even the hottest surfer spot in Australia, or Hawaii, or Southern California, where dudes mix it up with multi-metered monster waves, nor the stoner bar where they relax and tell tall toked-up tales of the pipelines that got away.

Point Nemo happens to be the furthest point in the ocean from land.

It lies in the central Pacific Ocean, nearly 1,500 miles or so from Pitcairn Island in the north, Easter Island in the northeast, and Maher island in the south, which lies just off the coast of Antarctica. Eggheads refer to it as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility.

Should you wish to plug the coordinates into your motorboat’s GPS (not recommended), you’d use 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south by 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west. From what I understand, H.P. Lovecraft used the coordinates in his infamous story The Call of Cthulhu, it being the location of the Old One’s ancient and terrible eldritch city. But I’d have to look that up; haven’t read it in four or five years.

My interest in Point Nemo was piqued upon reading a short article on the Tiangong-1. What? You don’t remember the Tiangong-1? That was the school-bus sized Chinese space station that plummeted to earth this past Easter. If you remember, “experts” were predicting it could come crashing down anywhere between latitude 43 degrees north (Hopper’s current hidden lair is at 41.01 degrees north) and 43 degrees south. That’s a wide swath of real estate. But, strangely enough considering there was no way to control the station’s crash, it landed very very close to Nemo. I say strange because, due to its isolation from shipping lanes and population centers, Point Nemo is chosen fairly regularly as a crash landing zone for artificial space debris, so much so that’s it’s informally known as the “satellite graveyard.”

Now, apparently there are these things called Gyres out on the seven seas – well, actually five of them. Gyres, not seas. One each in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Indian, North Pacific, and South Pacific oceans. Major currents, “mega” or even “meta” currents we can call them, to be overly hip, form a swirling Coriolis Effect due to the spin of the planet, and each, logically, has a center. Point Nemo forms the center of the South Pacific Gyre. And these things are big, thousands of miles along the furthest outer regions.

Unfortunately, gyres have two downsides. One is the swirling tides tend to keep nutrients from the center regions. So these centers tend to be lifeless. But worse, they also tend to accumulate all the ocean junk that’s out there: plastic bottles, other floating man-made debris, sludge and oil from spills, the occasional Chinese space station, and whatnot. So much so that Point Nemo also has the informal label of the South Pacific Garbage Patch. Yuck.

So now you have three new terms to dazzle your friends and acquaintances: Point Nemo, the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, and the South Pacific Ocean Gyre. Go forth and dazzle! And I shall abscond to my hidden undersea lair to plot how to use them all against mankind!