Does anyone know the URL to the website that will show you whats on the other side of the Earth from any given point, as defined by a line through the Earth’s core? I thought is was referenced on this board once in regard to de-bunking the notion that you could dig to China from the US, but my search-fu is weak today.
Try this: http://www.digholes.com/
You might like how this one works a bit better: http://map.pequenopolis.com/
Google maps will work. Zoom in on your location and then hit the “Link to this page button”. Change the signs of the lat/lon in the URL and hit return.
Crap. My hole comes out in the ocean about a thousand miles East of South Africa. The hole will fill with water.
That’s not your real problem, since the water would only come up to sea level on your side of the earth, due to gravity and all that. The problem is that the water below the earth’s crust would heat up to well above the boiling point of water (even at the pressure down there), and you would have a spectacular geyser coming out of your hole.
Oddly enough, neither of those are the application I was thinking of, but they both work just fine, especially Whack-a-Mole’s second one.
This won’t quite work. The latitude is right, but the antipodal longitude is given by (longitude - 180) in the Eastern hemisphere, and (longitude + 180) in the Western. (Taking the Eastern Hemisphere to be positive and the Western to be negative, as Google Maps does.)
:smack: Sorry about that. I should have thought about it a half a second longer before I posted.
I live in the negative half of the world?
That explains a ot.
Depending on the diameter (and therefore volume) of the hole, there might not be enough seawater to fill it.
In which case, you get a steam geyser (with boiled fish and krill, etc) in the hole, plus, you drain the oceans.
There’s a good antipodal map here, from the Wikipedia entry for Antipodes.
[There’s another map here, but I prefer the Wikipedia one.]
Looking at that map, it’s amazing how much land–most of it, it seems–is not opposite other land.
That’s because most of the surface of the earth is water, not land.
And also because a disproportionate part of the land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere.
The only places that I’ve ever been to that were opposite other land were in Spain, antipodal to New Zealand. Coincidentally, on one of those trips – to Galicia – I was with a friend from Christchurch NZ, and I mentioned that if she wanted to fly directly home in a private plane, it wouldn’t matter which direction she took since Christchurch was the same distance in all directions (ignoring non-sphericity of the earth and the need to refuel, of course). It took a tennis ball and felt-tip pen to convince her – I suppose that we’re all so used to Mercator projections that it initially seems weird to go from Spain to NZ via, say, the North Pole.
*[Wait, didn’t I tell this story on the SDMB a few months ago? … aha! * Here is the thread from April 2006 that addresses the OP’s question.]
But would they drain clockwise or counterclockwise 
(I want to hear the gurgle at the end.)
All this time I’ve been thinking that if I dug a hole through, I’d be in China. Now I find out I’d be in the ocean west of Australia. 
Who thinks of a spectacular geyser as a problem? It is an interesting question though. At around 3200 psi and 700 degrees F water becomes supercritical. Supercritical fluids have some properties that would make a 7400 mile high column of it something to think about. The pressure is more than high enough even 2 miles deep to be supercritical, so as soon as the temperature gets up to 700 F, there you go. I wonder what would happen.
It would definitely alter the tone of Cynical Gabe’s posts.
Then again, we’d always be able to refer to him as "that titanic spouting hothead. "
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