Point Nemo: Middle Of Nowhere Where Astronauts Are Your Neighbours

By Warren Hamilton Category: Geography & Maps 9th May 2026

Right, so imagine standing in the middle of the ocean. Now imagine standing so far away from any bit of land that the nearest bloke is not on a boat, or on an island with a cocktail, but floating above you in a tin can. That is Point Nemo. It is the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, sitting at about 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south and 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west. Sounds posh, but it basically means "you could not get here in a hurry".

Point Nemo is roughly 2,688 kilometres from the nearest bits of land. Those bits are tiny: Ducie Island near Pitcairn, Motu Nui next to Easter Island, and a blank bit of Antarctica called Maher Island. So you are not missing a beach bar. You are missing everything bar a lot of very wet sky.

Here is the daft part. Because it is so lonely, space agencies started using the area like a giant rubbish tip for retired satellites and busted stations. They call it the spacecraft cemetery. When a big lump of metal needs dropping out of the sky, they aim it there. Mir got sent there in 2001, among others. Imagine the paperwork for that job: "Sorry mate, we are dropping you off at the South Pacific skip. Please close the door behind you."

And the joke is, even when there are people nearby, they are not on the ground. The nearest humans to Point Nemo are usually the astronauts up on the International Space Station, about 400 kilometres above. So the people who count as "closest" are in space, looking down at a bit of ocean where the only neighbours are sunburnt birds and dead satellites. Makes you feel proper small, does not it?

I remember seeing a map of it ages ago and thinking someone had misplaced a punctuation mark. But no: maps will show this lonely dot, labelled Point Nemo, and every so often you realise we have places on Earth that are simply for dumping things and gawping at how remote we made them. Lovely, innit?