Just discovered by Antipodr that Bermuda and Perth are antipodes: located at the exact other ends of the Earth from each other.
I’m in Melbourne, Australia, which is the antipode of a spot on the h of North Atlantic Ocean on Antipodr’s map. By the end 
of tomorrow I’ll be back in New York, a couple thousand miles west of there, after flying most of the way around the world on four different planes and three different airlines. New York’s antipode is a spot not far southwest of Australia — maybe about as far from the coast as Brisbane is from Sydney, as you can see from the upside-down image of North America on the amazing map around which this text wraps.
The map is from Wikimedia Commons, and illustrates perfectly how little land is antipodal from other land. The sum, in fact, is just 4%. As Wikipedia currently puts it, “The largest antipodal land masses are the Malay Archipelago, antipodal to the Amazon Basin and adjoining Andean ranges; east China and Mongolia, antipodal to Chile and Argentina; and Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, antipodal to East Antarctica.”
Click on the map three times and you’ll find yourself at a large version of the map that lets you discover these other antipodes:
- Auckland and Tangier
- Chatham Islands and southern France
- Île Saint-Paul and a spot southwest of Cheyenne Wells, Colorado
- Île Amsterdam and Kerguelen Island and two other places I don’t have time to figure. The latter also overlaps with Canada.
Those last three are the sum of U.S. antipodes, at least for the lower forty-eight. Most of Hawaii is antipodal to Botswana, while the northern edge of Alaska is antipodal to an edge of Antarctica. Same with the most northern parts of Canada.
So that’s a little fun in the early hours before my last day of meetings here. It’s been a fun trip.
A question on parting: Have the link piles been useful or interesting? They’ve been all I’ve posted on this trip, because it’s easy and I sometimes feel like sharing what I’m reading. But I’ve had just one piece of feedback so far, and it was negative. So, if you care, lemme know.
Leave a Reply