An earlier version of this article was published in 2016.
Despite their apparent dominance of the seas and lands, the human being tends to live more and more concentrated. Strictly speaking, we occupy a tiny percentage of the planet’s total territory Land, even if we consume its resources in a generalized and intense way. So there are a lot of places in the world, whether they are terrestrial, inhabited, uninhabited or sea, to which we have limited or almost no access.
The phenomenon is fascinating and can be grouped under the category “poles of inaccessibility” of the Earth, so remote places whose mere existence turns into imagination for most of the human beings that have ever inhabited the planet. But among all of them, some famous and well documented, one stands out above the others: the Nemo Point, a place so far from everything that the closest human beings to it are the crew of the International Space Station when they eventually orbit it.
This is not an exaggeration: as the ISS paces the earth’s surface 400 kilometers up, Point Nemo is more than 2,600 kilometers from the nearest land point. It is a gigantic nothingness full of water. But the data on astronauts has a certain trick: many of the poles also count astronauts among their most regular travelers, since on the surface, they are thousands of kilometers from the most inhabited point.
A space graveyard and the home of Chtulhu
Is it relevant? Not too much. Measured in distance, space it’s not that far. As astronomer Fred Hoyle famously coined, space is not that remote: it only takes a couple of hours behind the wheel of a car.
Of course, Point Nemo does have a special relationship with space objects: since it has its back turned to civilization and nobody usually has the slightest interest in circulating there, it is used as a space cemetery, and many of the satellites of the space agencies, especially from the POT, they end their working days submerged in its sea depths.
Leaving space aside (the question is not how far it is but how long you can stay there and, above all, how to get there), the truth is that Point Nemo is the absolute emptiness of the planet. Located on Antarctica, in a very isolated point of the South Pacific, Point Nemo has been trodden on some occasions by adventurers on the back of a boat for the mere pleasure of telling the challenge. Because no commercial or tourist route crosses the point.
A picture is worth a thousand words. What we see below these lines is, although it may not seem like it, our planet. Specifically, the vast Pacific Ocean, the largest continuous body of water in existence. Point Nemo is marked in red. Yup, it’s overwhelming.
It’s so far away, it’s so mysterious that HP Lovecraft used a very rough location to imagine Chtulhu’s home, R’lyeh.
(No) there is life beyond the ocean
The oceans are full of places so far from any coast that it would take days and even weeks (fifteen days are lost in the calendar to reach Nemo Point, and that is the fastest record), but also the continents. Each one has his own. The one from Eurasia, for example, is in China, near the Kazakhstan border (a phrase that is a feast of joy and happiness in itself). In Africa, it is in the Central African Republic, near South Sudan.
But both are common places for human beings. They are inhabited, they have towns or cities nearby. They are only remote on maps, nothing more, but they can be reached reasonably and briefly.
What about places that are really far from the rest of human souls where reaching seems like a mind-boggling odyssey? The most spectacular of all the inhabited ones is also in the middle of the ocean. Specifically, in the Atlantic, and is called Tristan da Cunha, a tiny island still encompassed under the overseas territories of the United Kingdom and enjoyed in its virginity by just 300 inhabitants. Its closest neighbor, 2,000 kilometers away, is the island of Saint Helena (Napoleon’s), which in turn is 1,950 kilometers from Namibia.
It is literally the ass of the world.
From the world known and enjoyed by the human being. There are numerous such islands scattered throughout the oceans, but almost all of them are relatively accessible. The peculiarity of Tristan da Cunha is that it does not have an airport and that it can only be reached through a commercial maritime line whose frequency is ten times a year. That is, if you arrive, be clear that it is not to leave for a long (long) time.
But what about those other places in the world where we can set foot that are far from any human being? If we wanted to find a place to set up a cabin to be in the most absolute of solitudes, we would have to move to the bouvet island, a rock covered with snow and ice, tiny and imperceptible and claimed, in the middle of the South Atlantic, by the friendly nation of Norway (the first to reach the South Pole).
Bouvet Island is 2,400 kilometers from the African continent and 1,700 above Antarctica. You would have to navigate the equivalent distance between Madrid and London to reach the most uninhabited continent of all, and the distance that separates Barcelona from Warsaw to reach … Tristan da Cunha, in turn the most remote and inaccessible inhabited place in the world , whose nearest airport is 7 days by boat (private) and its mainland coast more accessible to an uncertain line of ridiculous frequency in the direction of South Africa.
Visit Lenin in the remotest part of Antarctica
But in continental terms, it seems reasonable to consider that it is in the Antarctica where the terrestrial point is found and not entirely surrounded by water where we can finally live in peace, far from all humanity. Well, bad news: it’s not the South Pole. It was there at the beginning of the 20th century and we decided to stay. There are people living permanently, so we would have to walk through the absolute Antarctic nothingness to find the point of inaccessibility of the South Pole: a statue of Lenin.
The Soviets were also encouraged to explore the frozen continent in the 1950s, and were the first to reach the furthest point from the sea within Antarctica. It is about 800 kilometers from the South Pole and there is a refuge, already covered by snow, on which a bust of Lenin stands out, placed there to commemorate the feat. Since then, only a handful of more expeditions have returned to the scene (the last in 2011), including an impressive Spanish polar adventure in 2005.
Finally, it is worth talking about the Arctic, which seems the smallest ocean. After all, the coasts of two continents are close, right? Only on the deformed maps: the reality is that in the middle of the ocean you can get to more than 1,000 kilometers (of ice, existential and physical emptiness) of the nearest coast). And it is believed that no one has ever stepped on it.