In America, most people believe that if you started digging and never stopped– they’d end up in China. According to latitudinal and longitudinal measurements, human perception couldn’t be further off.
Related: Data Scientist Creates Fully Optimized Road Trip Map To Every National Park
A new website is using such measurements to illustrate where you’d end up if you started digging directly down at a 90° angle. Known as ‘antipodes,’ the website employs the opposite latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates to find out where on earth we’d end up if we just started digging without any of those pesky restraints like time and mortality.
“The antipodes of any place on the Earth is the point on the Earth’s surface which is diametrically opposite to it. Two points that are antipodal to each other are connected by a straight line running through the centre of the Earth. An antipodal point it is often called an antipode.”
For Americans, we’d almost always end up somewhere in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean while our South American neighbors would break through and find themselves in a polluted Shanghai, a beautiful island in Singapore, or you guessed it– out in the ocean somewhere. The big takeaway from these maps is that our planet is indeed mostly blue and if you started digging you’d likely end up drowning along the way.
[Find out where you’d end up: Antipodes Map]
[sigallery id=”9UdsFktJNZQNen2NmQgrHR” title=”Antipodes Map” type=”sigallery”]
Anitpodes Facts (*Courtesy of Antipodes Map)
- In the Northern Hemisphere, “the Antipodes” is often used to refer to Australia and New Zealand, and “Antipodeans” to their inhabitants.
- The two largest human inhabited antipodal areas are located in East Asia (China, Mongolia) and South America (Argentina and Chile).
- The largest antipodal land masses are the Malay Archipelago (Indonesia, Philippines, New Guinea), antipodal to the Amazon Basin and adjoining Andean ranges.
- The Australian mainland is the largest landmass with its antipodes entirely in ocean.
- The majority of locations on land do not have land-based antipodes.
- By definition, the North Pole and the South Pole are antipodes.
- There are no non-stop scheduled flights between any two antipodal locations by commercial airline service. A hypothetically perfect antipode flight would be Tangier Ibn Battouta Airport, Morocco to Whangarei Aerodrome, New Zealand (approximately 20000 km flight).
Find out where you’d end up here: Antipodes Maps