Despite the fact that technology makes us think that all parts of the planet are within our reach, there are still unexplored places that remind us that there is still much to discover. Such is the case of point nemoconsidered the most remote place on Earth due to its location.
What is Point Nemo?
Point Nemo is located 4,800 kilometers off the New Zealand coast and 3,200 kilometers north of Antarctica. It is so isolated that the closest point of land to this site is more than 400 kilometers away. Which means that the closest humans to this region of the planet are the astronauts on the International Space Station.
Also called Pole of Inaccessibility of the Pacific, although due to the complexity of its name it is commonly known as Punto Nemo in honor of the Captain Nemo, a fictional character from Jules Verne’s literature.
This point was identified barely 30 years ago, when the engineer Hrvoje Lukatele calculated its coordinates as precisely as possible. However, it was necessary to use a specialized computer program to know the exact coordinates.
What’s at Point Nemo?
Point Nemo is completely uninhabited due to its geographical conditions that are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This important natural laboratory is between 227 and 248 nautical miles above the surface of our planet.
At this point in the Pacific Ocean there is a huge continuous body of water. What causes that there is almost no existence of aquatic life because it is too far from the mainland and the winds do not carry biological matter there. Although nothing can certainly be concluded, since life has been found in other regions of the planet that were previously believed to be inhospitable.
Be that as it may, the belief that it is a biologically inactive spot led NASA to turn it into a spacecraft graveyard. And it even recently announced that it would be the resting place of the International Space Station after it fulfills its functions in 2030.
A graveyard of spaceships
This will not be the first time that this remote site is the dumping ground for objects that were in space. It has long since become a graveyard for ships, as various countries have directed space junk to it. The Russian and Japanese space agencies have sent their obsolete satellites to the depths of this region in the Pacific Ocean. And also there rest the remains of the Russian Mir station and at least a hundred other disused space objects.
The sound of Point Nemo
During the summer of 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) picked up a strange ultra-low frequency sound through underwater microphones placed in the Pacific Ocean. This enigmatic noise was then called Bloop. However, despite the mystery it represented at the time, five years later the agency determined that the sounds came from Point Nemo and that they were produced by large icebergs colliding with the ocean floor.
Our planet is gigantic compared to the tiny size of human beings and it still has great surprises to offer us.
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