If I were Supergirl, and flew straight down, through the downstairs neighbors’ apartment, the basement, the foundation, and kept going in a straight line, where would I end up, assuming I survived the molten lava? How could I find this out?
Enter your latitude and longitude into this calculator and you can see what’s on the opposite side of the globe (the antipode) from you on Google Earth.
Several people have done graphical tools. One here:
http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/tool.html
As to how you calculate it - your antipodal point is at the same latitude in the opposite hemisphere (switch N and S), and 180 degrees around the world from you in longitude, which will mean that you subtract your longitude from 180 and switch E and W (if you are exactly on 180 or 0 that last part doesn’t matter).
So opposite 38 N, 122 W, for instance, is 38 S, 58 E.
I discovered this on Google Earth a few weeks ago. First, you use the measure tool and select your location as the start point. Next, drag the cursor to the other side of the globe and move it around until the line jumps to the other side of the globe. For instance, I live on Kauai and I selected my house then dragged the cursor to the vicinity of South Africa heading ESE. When I got to more than half way around the globe the line jumped to heading west from Kauai since that was now the shortest distance. After this you move the cursor back towards the midway point. If you move the cursor around you will find that there is a point at which the measure line moves in circles all around the globe, that is the point on the opposite side of the world from you, according to Google Earth.
Here are some earlier threads on the same subject.
There’s a good antipodal map here, which illustrates nicely that there’s not very much land area on Earth that’s antipodal to other land.
Thanks for the responses everyone! All your posts and links are fascinating.
That’s too cool. I’d end up in the Indian Ocean off the westen coast of Australia (in fact, the entire United States and most of North America would end up in the Indian Ocean). I’d better not try it, since I can’t swim.
Yep. There’s only three islands opposite the contiguous US (lower 48). Two small ones (Amsterdam and St Paul Islands) are opposite part of eastern Colorado and part of Kerguelen I is opposite Montana, way up near the Canadian border. In fact, the 49th parallel South runs through Kerguelen so most of that island is antipodal to Alberta and Saskatchewan. Heard I is also antipodal to somewhere in central Sask. Other than that, the only land opposite North America is Antarctica.
As noted above, Hawaii is opposite Africa. Mostly Botswana, IIRC, but possibly also Namibia.
Australia is the largest country without any land on the other side of the world, although a couple islands come close. Bermuda is opposite the ocean about thirty or forty Km offshore Perth; some of the Azores are opposite the Bass Strait just north of Tasmania.
Damn ! I always thought grass is greener on the other side…It turns out there is no grass, only the deep blue waters of of south pacific ocean … :smack:
I am dropping the idea of coming over there .
Make a hole with a gun, perpendicular
to the name of this town in a desktop globe;
exit wound in a foreign nation…
So you’d have to live in southern Argentina or Chile to dig a hole to China? Cool.
Good thing I never finished that hole I started as a kid.
It looks like the hole my wife started (or should have started :mad: ) in Taipei would have put her on the border of Argentina and Paraguay.
I showed this to my wife and she reminded me that’s she’s always liked Paraguay. Interesting coincidence.
Does anybody else find this fact quite remarkable? I understand that the ratio of land mass to ocean would lean things in this direction, but it’s almost like a jigsaw how many places seem to fit perfectly into antipodean water. Apart from part of New Zealand (which hits the Iberian Peninsula), it seems almost the entire English-speaking world has no land at its antipodes. Pretty cool.
It is a bit, isn’t it? You would expect about 30% of all land to be antipodal to other land, if it were distributed randomly and uniformly.
But of course it’s not distributed that way. The bulk of the Earth’s landmass is in the northern hemisphere, and the antipodal region of the northern hemisphere is the southern hemisphere — which is mostly ocean.
The effect would have been even more extreme while Pangea was still formed, of course, although the dividing line would not have been the equator. Effectively, all significant land was globbed into one supercontinent on one side of the planet, surrounded by a huge single ocean. Representations show Pangea with land at both polar regions, so those would have been antipodal, but the vast majority of land would have been opposite water. IIRC, we’re fairly close to the maximum dispersal point, about halfway between the breakup of Pangea and the formation of another supercontinent in 300 million years or so.
Oh, and the general “If the earth were a sandwich” site I took my link from is amusing:
http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/
Apparently, people in Spain and New Zealand managed it.
I love geeks!
I love the internet!
Together, they make the world a better and more fun place.
My 6th grade classroom had a globe (~2’ diameter) made of clear plastic, and you could just look through it to get an idea. From Washington, D.C., Australia was pretty close to antipodal. Made it easy to understand the term “down under.”
That’s cool. When this topic came up a while ago (the antipodes thing, not the Earth Sandwich), I realised that I visited two antipodal points (Ronda in Spain and Auckland in New Zealand) within 5 months of each other in 2003. Can anyone beat that? 