Learn & Understand

The Other Side of the World: The Antipodes

Dig straight down through the center of the Earth and you would emerge at your antipode — the point exactly opposite on the globe. The idea has fascinated and troubled thinkers for millennia, from ancient debates about whether people could live “upside down” on the far side to the surprising modern discovery that most such tunnels would surface in the open ocean.

The Point Directly Opposite

An antipode is the point on the Earth's surface diametrically opposite a given place — the spot you would reach by tunneling straight through the planet's core. Finding it is simple in principle: flip to the opposite hemisphere north-south, and rotate halfway around east-west. Every point on Earth has exactly one antipode, its mirror across the globe's center.

An Ancient Puzzle

The antipodes vexed classical and medieval thinkers. If people lived on the opposite side of a round Earth, some wondered, would they not be upside down, and would they not fall off? The word “antipodes” comes from Greek for “feet opposite” — imagining people whose feet pointed toward one's own across the globe. Understanding that gravity pulls everywhere toward the center resolved the ancient worry.

Debunking “Digging to China”

A childhood myth holds that digging straight down leads to China. For most of the Northern Hemisphere it is quite wrong. Antipodal points lie in opposite hemispheres, so two places both north of the equator can never be antipodes. Much of the northern landmass antipodes not to another continent but to the far southern oceans — the tunnel would open into water, not another country.

A World Mostly Water

Because oceans cover most of the planet, and land clusters in the Northern Hemisphere, the antipode of most land is open sea. Relatively few places on Earth have land at both ends of a through-the-center tunnel. The antipode calculation, playful as it seems, quietly illustrates a real fact about our world: it is far more ocean than land, and lopsidedly so.

Finding the Antipode

To find any point's antipode, use the Antipode Calculator. Explore the globe's geometry with the Great Circle Distance Calculator, and locate points with the Latitude Longitude Converter.