Far Off
Nine times out of ten, you come out in water. Only about 15% of the Earth’s land has land on the opposite side, which is roughly 4.4% of the planet’s surface. Dig from New York and you surface at 40.71° S, 105.99° E, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
| Starting point | Exit point | Land or sea |
|---|---|---|
| United States (New York) | 40.71° S, 105.99° E | Indian Ocean |
| United Kingdom (London) | 51.51° S, 179.87° E | South Pacific |
| Australia (Perth) | 31.95° N, 64.14° W | Atlantic, near Bermuda |
| Spain (Madrid) | 40.42° S, 176.30° E | New Zealand |
| France (Paris) | 48.86° S, 177.65° W | South Pacific |
| China (Beijing) | 39.90° S, 63.59° W | Argentina |
| Brazil (Brasília) | 15.79° N, 132.12° E | Philippine Sea |
| Japan (Tokyo) | 35.68° S, 40.35° W | South Atlantic |
| India (Delhi) | 28.61° S, 102.79° W | South Pacific |
| South Africa (Johannesburg) | 26.20° N, 151.95° W | North Pacific |
1. From the United States: the Indian Ocean, not China
A shaft under New York surfaces at 40.71° S, 105.99° E, about 1,000 km southwest of Australia. Across the whole of the contiguous 48 states there are only three patches of ground with a land antipode: two in eastern Colorado and one in the north of Liberty County, Montana.
Detail. Those three patches face specks of French territory in the southern Indian Ocean. Colorado is opposite Amsterdam Island and Saint-Paul; Montana is opposite the Kerguelen Islands, whose antipode mostly falls across the border in the Canadian prairie, between Alberta and Saskatchewan. Hawaii is the real exception: Honolulu surfaces at 21.31° S, 22.14° E in Botswana, and the Big Island faces the Okavango Delta.
2. From the United Kingdom: 218 km from the Antipodes Islands
London (51.5074° N, 0.1278° W) surfaces at 51.51° S, 179.87° E. The Antipodes Islands, 218 km away, owe their name to exactly this: British sealers christened them in 1800 because they sat almost opposite Greenwich.
Detail. The only British territory whose shaft hits dry ground is Gibraltar, which surfaces at Te Arai, about 85 km north of Auckland. Sitting at the foot of Spain, it inherits Spain’s New Zealand antipode.
3. From Australia: 70 km from Bermuda
Perth (31.9505° S, 115.8605° E) surfaces at 31.95° N, 64.14° W, which is 70 km from Bermuda. Sydney surfaces at 33.87° N, 28.79° W, in the open Atlantic south of the Azores.
Detail. Rottnest Island, off Perth, is almost exactly antipodal to Bermuda. Two small islands off a continental shelf, one in the Indian Ocean and one in the Atlantic, with nothing else in common.
4. From Spain: New Zealand, genuinely
Madrid (40.4168° N, 3.7038° W) surfaces at 40.42° S, 176.30° E, 3 km from the village of Weber in the Tararua District of the North Island. Spain is the only large western European country whose shaft comes out on inhabited land.
Detail. The pairing works both ways: Wellington’s antipode is Alaejos in Castile and León, and Christchurch’s falls near A Coruña. Spanish and New Zealand schools have twinned on that basis alone.
5. From France: empty South Pacific
Paris surfaces at 48.86° S, 177.65° W, 276 km from the Antipodes Islands and 552 km from the Chathams. No city in mainland France has a land antipode.
Detail. France is the textbook case of a country with nothing on the far side. The city-by-city breakdown, including the overseas territories that do hit land, is in the antipode of France.
6. From China: Argentina
Beijing (39.9042° N, 116.4074° E) surfaces at 39.90° S, 63.59° W, in northern Patagonia between Bahía Blanca and Viedma. Shanghai surfaces at 31.23° S, 58.53° W, near the Argentina-Uruguay border.
Detail. This is what kills the phrase “digging a hole to China”. From North America you never arrive in China. The reverse holds instead: eastern China and Mongolia, against Argentina and Chile, form one of the largest land-to-land antipodal pairs on the planet.
7. From Brazil: the Philippine Sea, and Borneo
Brasília surfaces at 15.79° N, 132.12° E, in the Philippine Sea. The western Amazon does better: São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in Amazonas state, surfaces at 0.13° N, 112.91° E, in the middle of Borneo.
Detail. The Malay Archipelago facing the Amazon basin and the Andes is the largest land-to-land antipodal pair on Earth. Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines, is antipodal to eastern Bolivia. Two equatorial rainforests, diametrically opposed.
8. From Japan: the South Atlantic
Tokyo (35.6762° N, 139.6503° E) surfaces at 35.68° S, 40.35° W, in the South Atlantic roughly 1,300 km east of Uruguay. The entire Japanese archipelago faces water.
Detail. South Korea just makes it. Jeju Island, its southernmost territory, is antipodal to Santa Vitória do Palmar in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul. A few hundred kilometres of longitude are all that separate Japan from the same result.
9. From India: the South Pacific, near Easter Island
Delhi (28.6139° N, 77.2090° E) surfaces at 28.61° S, 102.79° W, in the South Pacific. Mumbai surfaces at 19.08° S, 107.12° W, even further from anything.
Detail. Easter Island, the most isolated inhabited place in the Pacific, has its antipode in the Thar Desert, 35 km from Jaisalmer in Rajasthan. That patch of Rajasthan is the only part of India that comes out on solid ground.
10. From South Africa: the North Pacific
Johannesburg (26.2041° S, 28.0473° E) surfaces at 26.20° N, 151.95° W, about 800 km northeast of Hawaii. Cape Town surfaces at 33.92° N, 161.58° W, further out into the empty Pacific.
Detail. The neighbour does better. Botswana is the antipode of Hawaii: Ghanzi faces Lihue on Kauai, Maun faces Kailua-Kona. The Okavango Delta and the volcanoes of the Big Island are about as opposite as two landscapes get, in the strict geometric sense.
The physics: 12,742 km and 42 minutes
The Earth’s mean diameter is 12,742 km. It varies with the axis you pick: 12,756 km across the equator, 12,714 km pole to pole, because rotation flattens the planet.
In an airless, frictionless tunnel through an Earth of uniform density, the fall from one side to the other takes 42 minutes. This is the classic gravity train problem. Gravity pulls you toward the centre, you accelerate for the first half and decelerate by exactly as much on the second, arriving at the far end with zero velocity. Peak speed at the centre is about 7.9 km/s, or 28,000 km/h, the order of magnitude of orbital velocity.
That 42-minute figure assumes constant density, which the Earth does not have. Using the PREM model, which describes the real density layer by layer, the fall time drops to 38 minutes. The difference comes from the core: gravity does not start weakening at the surface, it rises to around 1.09 g before collapsing toward the centre.
The counter-intuitive part of the uniform model is that travel time does not depend on tunnel length. A straight chord from London to Sydney would take the same 42 minutes as a shaft through the centre. Only the peak speed changes.
Why nobody will ever dig it
The deepest hole ever drilled is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in northwest Russia: 12,262 metres, reached in 1989. That is 0.2% of the way. Work stopped because at 180 °C the rock turned plastic and closed back around the drill bit.
The rest of the programme is out of reach:
- Heat. Roughly 4,000 °C at the core-mantle boundary and around 5,200 °C in the inner core. No known material holds its shape there.
- Pressure. About 360 gigapascals at the centre, more than three million times atmospheric pressure. A tunnel would seal itself instantly.
- State of matter. The outer core is liquid, 2,300 km of it. You do not drill through convecting liquid iron; you pass through it and it closes behind you.
- Rotation. Even in a perfect tunnel, the Coriolis force would push a falling body into the wall, unless the shaft ran exactly along the polar axis.
And the payoff is poor. A point and its antipode are 20,037 km apart across the surface, half the Earth’s circumference and the maximum possible distance on the planet. Even the longest commercial flight in the world covers barely three quarters of it.
Mirror piece: what is the antipode of France. Further reading: the most isolated cities in the world, the longest straight line on Earth and the longest train journeys in the world.
Frequently asked questions
If you dig a hole from the US, do you come out in China?
No. A shaft from New York surfaces at 40.71° S, 105.99° E, in the Indian Ocean about 1,000 km southwest of Australia. China is antipodal to Argentina and Chile, not to North America. Only three small areas of the contiguous 48 states have land antipodes, in eastern Colorado and northern Montana, and they face tiny French islands in the southern Indian Ocean.
Where do you come out digging from the UK?
In the South Pacific, at 51.51° S, 179.87° E if you start in London. The exit point is 218 km from New Zealand’s Antipodes Islands, which were named in 1800 precisely because they lie almost opposite Greenwich. No part of mainland Britain has a land antipode. Gibraltar is the only British territory that does, surfacing at Te Arai north of Auckland.
How long does the fall through the Earth take?
About 42 minutes in the classic model, which assumes uniform density, no air and no friction. Using the Earth’s actual density profile from the PREM model, the figure drops to 38 minutes. Either way you arrive at the far end at almost zero speed, then fall back and oscillate between the two ends indefinitely.
How thick is the Earth you would have to drill through?
12,742 km, the mean diameter of the globe. The exact figure depends on the axis: 12,756 km at the equator, 12,714 km from pole to pole. The Earth is not a perfect sphere; rotation flattens it by about 21 km at the poles.
What is the deepest hole ever dug?
The Kola Superdeep Borehole in northwest Russia, which reached 12,262 metres in 1989. That is 0.2% of the Earth’s diameter, and roughly a third of the way through the continental crust at that location. Drilling was abandoned because the rock at 180 °C behaved like putty and squeezed the borehole shut.