Point Nemo: The Loneliest Spot on Earth, Where Spaceships Go to Die

There is a point in the South Pacific where, if you were floating on the surface, the nearest other human beings would frequently be not on any shore but two hundred and fifty miles straight up, aboard the International Space Station passing overhead. Every landmass is more than a thousand miles away in every direction. You are as far from other people as it is possible to be on a planet covered in ocean. This is Point Nemo.

It is not a place you visit. It is a coordinate, calculated rather than discovered, and it has quietly become one of the strangest addresses on Earth.

A place found with math

Point Nemo is the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the single spot in the sea farthest from any land. It was not stumbled upon by a ship; it was computed in 1992 by a survey engineer named Hrvoje Lukatela, who used geometry to find the point equidistant from the three nearest coastlines: an atoll in the Pitcairn Islands, one of the Easter Islands, and a speck off Antarctica. The name is a nod to Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, the sea's great recluse.

The water there is also biologically empty by ocean standards. It sits inside the South Pacific Gyre, a vast slow whirlpool of current that keeps nutrient-rich water out, so relatively little lives in the sunlit layer. Remote and lifeless, it turned out to be perfect for a specific and slightly eerie purpose.

The spacecraft cemetery

Because nothing and no one is beneath it, Point Nemo is where space agencies deliberately crash their dead spacecraft. When a satellite or a station reaches the end of its life and is too big to burn up entirely on reentry, controllers aim the surviving debris at this empty patch of sea. Hundreds of craft rest on the seabed there, including Russian resupply ships and, eventually, the Russian Mir station. The International Space Station itself is slated to be brought down near Point Nemo when it is retired. The loneliest place on the planet is, fittingly, a graveyard for the machines we sent to the loneliest place above it.

Where the emptiness gets loud

For a while the region had a genuine unsolved sound to go with its solitude. In 1997 hydrophones picked up an ultra-low-frequency noise, nicknamed the Bloop, loud enough to be detected across thousands of miles of ocean and originating from roughly this part of the South Pacific. For years it fueled speculation about an unknown sea creature larger than any known animal. The honest resolution came later: scientists matched its acoustic signature to icequakes, the cracking and calving of Antarctic ice. It was folklore-in-waiting that turned out to be geology.

That is the pattern with Point Nemo. The tidy account is complete, remote water, no life, a debris field, a solved sound. What lingers is the idea of the place: a spot on your own planet more isolated than orbit, where sunk spacecraft lie under empty sea and the loudest thing for a decade was ice breaking a continent away. Below, readers have filed their own accounts of vast, empty, unnerving places and the sounds that come out of them, each voted True, Fake or Not sure. Read them and cast your verdict.