By now, humanity has reason to feel proud of having reached nearly every corner of the planet. For the past two centuries, it has seemed as though nothing on Earth remained to be explored — which is why, once technology made it possible, we turned our attention to space. And yet, for those willing to look, a vast and largely unknown world still lies beneath the sea.
The oceans continue to hold countless secrets for those who dare to seek them. Nowhere is that more true than in the Pacific Ocean, the largest on Earth, covering nearly half of the planet’s total water surface.
Its sheer scale sets it apart — extraordinary, and in some ways hard to pin down. On most maps, its true magnitude is impossible to grasp, in part because it so often gets split across the edges of the frame.
The Pacific remains one of the most spectacular frontiers for marine explorers, home to remarkable spots like the Pacific Pole of Inaccessibility — the most remote location on the planet.
That place has a name: Point Nemo.
Point Nemo: A Desolate Outpost More Than 1,670 Miles From Anywhere
Point Nemo was discovered in 1992 by engineer Hrvoje Lukatela, who used a computer program to calculate the coordinates of the most inaccessible point on Earth.
He found it in the South Pacific, more than 1,670 miles from the nearest coastline — and, of course, completely uninhabited. In a nod to Jules Verne’s famous character, Lukatela named the spot Point Nemo, from the Latin for “no one” or “nobody’s point.”
What makes the location’s isolation truly remarkable is that the people closest to it don’t live on land at all. In fact, the most frequent “neighbors” of Point Nemo are the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, which passes directly overhead — though admittedly at an altitude of about 249 miles.
That orbital proximity, strange as it sounds, means those astronauts are the humans who come closest to this forbidding stretch of ocean. And the remoteness that defines Point Nemo has given it a purpose that reveals something about our ambitions beyond Earth.
Because of its extraordinary distance from any inhabited place, Point Nemo has become a kind of spacecraft graveyard. When space agencies need to dispose of hardware that is neither easy nor cheap to recycle, they guide it toward a controlled reentry over the Pacific, where the debris sinks to the ocean floor more than 11,800 feet below the surface.
Down there, where the wreckage “bothers no one,” lie the remnants of the Cold War space race — the hardware of an era when the United States and the Soviet Union spent fortunes and risked lives to reach the stars. But that may not be the only secret Point Nemo keeps.
Point Nemo in Literature and Science Fiction
While Point Nemo shares only a name with Jules Verne’s legendary Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the location has inspired its own mythology — one that, in at least one case, predates its official discovery.
Decades before Lukatela ran his calculations, the American writer H.P. Lovecraft had already singled out the most desolate place on the planet with uncanny precision.
Lovecraft placed his mythical city of R’lyeh at coordinates that nearly match those of Point Nemo. Call it coincidence — though it is clear that Lovecraft instinctively understood that the resting place of his ancient god Cthulhu had to be somewhere as far from civilization as possible, lost in the middle of the ocean. When the stars align and the cosmic deity stirs from its slumber, it will happen very close to this spot. One imagines we will find out, one way or another.
Fiction has continued to find Point Nemo irresistible, using it as a hiding place for villains and buried secrets — because, after all, no corner of the world is more hidden.
The Amazon Prime series “Punto Nemo” follows a Spanish expedition that reaches this stretch of the Pacific after weathering a storm, only to find a small island hiding far too many secrets. The show leans into every theory about what the most remote place on Earth might be hiding, evoking the same unsettling atmosphere as Lost.
There is also a more subtle nod to Point Nemo in the blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick. At one point, coordinates are given for a strike on an enemy base supposedly hidden somewhere in the mountains of an unnamed country. Those coordinates, however, correspond precisely to Point Nemo — chosen deliberately to avoid implicating any real nation.
In reality, this place is all but unreachable for any ordinary human being. Being stranded near Point Nemo would, in practice, be a death sentence — there is simply nothing within reach that could offer help. Still, the location has been studied from above and passed by a handful of research vessels. So far, nothing unusual has turned up.
And yet, who can say what secrets the most inaccessible place on Earth might yet be keeping?
