When did you last experience a total solar eclipse in your home town? The odds are never…the average time between them in one place is 375 years.
But what place on Earth would have the longest gsp? For example, what is now Regina (Canada) last experienced one on May 19, 54 BC, and not another one until October 17, 2153…a gap of 2207 years.
I will see one on April 8, 2024 (and you will too if you live in places such as Dallas, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Buffalo, or Montreal)…the last one in my area was on August 31, 1932.
Given enough time the answer would be that everywhere has the same change of a total solar eclipse, and the time between them just the tails of the distribution. Enough time is however a very long time and a couple of things will complicate matters.
Total eclipses are very finely balanced, about half of them are never total, and just annular, as the moon is too far away to completely cover the solar disk as viewed from the Earth. But a billion years ago it was only 90% of the distance it now orbits at, and it is still retreating. At its birth, the moon was 25% of its current distance. But things were a bit extreme for anyone to be bothered about such trivialities as solar eclipses. As the moon retreats, at some point, solar eclipses will cease. Not too far off in geological time. That will be sad.
Since the moon has not always been the current distance away, the distribution of eclipses is not what it is now. A billion years ago they would have been much more common, longer lasting, and covered a much larger area of the Earth.
If we take the current orbit as the basis for estimates, I think, that the poles would get fractionally fewer solar eclipses, simple because they are, on average, during the day (which is when we see solar eclipses), just a tiny bit further away from the moon than the rest of the Earth. Even allowing for the tilt of the Earth’s axis, the patch of Earth near the poles never gets closer to the Moon than any other part of the globe, and thus, over time, they will see ever so slightly more annular eclipses than the rest of the globe. Thus hand-waving furiously, they are more likely to have the longest period between consecutive total eclipses. Maybe, and by a minuscule fraction.
The southern hemisphere also gets fractionally fewer total eclipses over time. Earth is slightly closer to the sun when it is summer there, when there are more eclipses due to the longer days. As such, a larger fraction of eclipses will be annular.
Over on StackExchange, someone made a map that superimposed the eclipse paths from 2000 BC through 3000 AD. They found three small areas which did not/will not lie in the path of totality for any eclipses during that time. (They’re very small areas: one on the Brazil-Bolivia border, one in southern Congo, and one in Zimbabwe.)
