Antipode

Think of Earth as a round apple. If you push a long skewer straight into the apple so that it passes through the center core and exits out the other side, you get two holes. Just like these two holes, two points directly facing each other across Earth's center are called paired opposites on Earth—or antipodes.

You can easily find the antipode of any location on a map using a couple of simple rules. For latitude, you simply flip North and South. For example, if Seoul sits around 37 degrees North, its antipode lies at 37 degrees South.

For longitude, you need to travel halfway around the globe, which is 180 degrees. If you start at 127 degrees East, you subtract 127 from 180 to get 53 degrees West. The coordinates you calculate this way mark the spot directly opposite across Earth's center from where you stand.

As a kid, you might have imagined digging endlessly through the dirt and popping up on the other side of the world in America or Brazil. But if you actually dug straight down through Earth's center from Seoul, you would not hit dry land—you would emerge into the open waters of the South Atlantic Ocean, southeast of Uruguay. It is an isolated patch of ocean, though the antipode of areas farther south like Jeju Island does brush near the land border between Brazil and Uruguay.

Surprisingly, the antipode of most land on Earth is open ocean. This is because oceans cover over 70 percent of Earth's surface, and most of our continents are clustered in the Northern Hemisphere.

Starting on land and hitting land on the other side happens for roughly 15 percent of land areas, which is only about 4 percent of Earth's total surface. Famous rare land-to-land antipodes include mainland Spain connecting to New Zealand, and parts of China connecting to Argentina.

Antipodes are not just spatially the farthest points apart—their seasons and times of day run in complete reverse. Because they sit in opposite hemispheres, when one side experiences a snowy midwinter, the ocean at its antipode is bathed in blazing midsummer sunshine.

By solar time, the clock is flipped by 12 hours. When you are eating lunch at noon, your antipode is shrouded in midnight darkness. Day and night are completely inverted. In practice, actual clock times may vary slightly due to standardized time zones and daylight saving time.

To be precise, Earth is not a flawless sphere but an oblate spheroid that bulges slightly at the equator. Yet because a spheroid is still symmetrical around its center, the latitude and longitude rules still hold true. Tiny variations exist if you factor in the elevation of mountains and ocean trenches, but the core truth remains: it marks the most distant place on Earth from you.