Daily Dose · Maps / Aug 28, 2026 / Antipodes

Dig Straight Down, Hit Water

Pick a spot on land. Draw a line through the centre of the Earth. Where it comes out the other side is your antipode — and almost certainly, it is open ocean. Land sits opposite land on only a sliver of this planet, and the map below shows exactly where that sliver is.

4.4%

of Earth’s surface is land with land directly opposite it.
Put another way: about 15% of all land has a land antipode — the other 85% is opposite open water.
Wikipedia, “Antipodes”, accessed Aug 2026

land opposite land land opposite ocean ocean an antipodal pair

Equirectangular projection. Red marks every place where land lies opposite land — computed by reflecting the whole coastline through the centre of the sphere (flip north–south, shift 180° of longitude) and keeping only where the reflection falls back on land. Coastlines are hand-simplified, so the red shapes are indicative; their locations are real. Dashed lines link four antipodal pairs.

The surface budget

Split the planet in two and almost nothing lines up

Earth is 29% land. If land were scattered at random, roughly 29% of that land would have a land antipode. Instead it is 15% — land actively avoids its own opposite, because the great continental mass of the north sits opposite the great ocean of the south.

4.4% land opposite land

46.4%ocean opposite ocean

24.6%ocean opposite land

24.6%land opposite ocean

Every square metre of Earth, sorted by what lies on the far side of the core. Derived from the 29% land / 71% ocean split and the 4.4% land-opposite-land figure — arithmetic, not a measurement.

Three overlaps

Nearly all of the 4.4% is in three places

East Asia opposite southern South America. The islands of Southeast Asia opposite the Amazon. Greenland and the Canadian Arctic opposite East Antarctica. Everything else is scraps — Iberia against New Zealand, a few islands, a couple of fields in Colorado.

East China · Mongolia

Argentina · Chile · Bolivia

Malay Archipelago

Amazon Basin · Andes

Iberia · Morocco

New Zealand

Each pair of windows is exactly antipodal: same longitudes 180° apart, same latitudes north and south. Red is the overlap. The third pair — Iberia and New Zealand — is why Wellington’s antipode is a Spanish village called Alaejos, and why Christchurch’s is A Coruña.

Share antipodal to land

Borneo 100%, Australia 0%

Borneo is the largest landmass on Earth whose antipodes lie entirely on land — every point on it is opposite the Amazon basin. Australia is the opposite case: dig anywhere in it and you surface in the North Atlantic.

Borneo

antipodes entirely on land — the Amazon basin

100%

Iberian Peninsula (illustrative)

illustrative — opposite the New Zealand islands

~62%

All land on Earth

the global figure

15%

Earth’s whole surface

land with land directly opposite

4.4%

Contiguous U.S.

two patches on the Colorado plains

≈0%

Australia

antipodes lie wholly in the North Atlantic

Read it this way

The contiguous United States has almost no land antipodes at all.

Drill down from anywhere between Maine and California and you come up in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of kilometres from anything. The only exceptions are two patches of rangeland on the Colorado plains, near Lamar and Kit Carson.

The old playground line about digging to China is geometrically backwards. From the United States you would need to start in Colorado — and from China, the hole comes out in Argentina.

Two hemispheres

Nantes and the Bounty Islands

There is one way to cut Earth in half that maximises land on one side. Its pole sits near Nantes, France. The other half — centred on its antipode, near New Zealand’s Bounty Islands — is the emptiest hemisphere on the planet.

Land hemisphere centred 47°13′N 1°32′W · near Nantes, France

47% land · 53% water

Earth, overall the whole sphere

29% land · 71% water

Water hemisphere centred 47°13′S 178°28′E · near the Bounty Islands

6% land · 5% ice · 89% ocean

80.1%

of all Earth’s land sits inside the land hemisphere

89%

of the water hemisphere is open ocean

Even the land hemisphere is 53% water. That is the whole story of antipodes in one number: the best half of Earth you can pick is still mostly sea, so the odds of both ends of a line through the core hitting ground are slim.

Near misses

The cities that almost line up

Taipei and Asunción are the closest antipodal pair of national capitals on Earth: each sits about 86 km from the exact opposite of the other. Everything else on this list is an accident of the Iberia–New Zealand and China–Argentina overlaps.

Taipei, Taiwan↔Asunción, Paraguay 86 km off

Wellington, N.Z.↔Alaejos, Spain near-exact

Christchurch, N.Z.↔A Coruña, Spain near-exact

Hong Kong↔La Quiaca, Argentina near-exact

Madrid, Spain↔Weber, N.Z. near-exact

Beijing, China↔Bahía Blanca, Argentina under 100 km

Shanghai, China↔Salto, Uruguay under 100 km

Whangārei, N.Z.↔Tangier, Morocco near-exact

Two distances

Your antipode is 20,015 km away if you travel across the surface — the longest journey possible on Earth — but only 12,742 km in a straight line through the core. The tunnel is 36% shorter than the trip.

Named for the idea

The islands that missed by a country

In 1800, Captain Henry Waterhouse of HMS Reliance sighted a cluster of cliffs 860 km southeast of Stewart Island. They were called “Penantipodes” — next to the antipodes — because they sit near, but not on, the point opposite London.

km² of land — the entire Antipodes Islands group

860

km southeast of Stewart Island / Rakiura

permanent residents; a UNESCO World Heritage nature reserve

The name is a near miss by roughly the width of the English Channel. The true antipode of the islands’ centre falls just off the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy — French water, not London. Their highest point, Mount Galloway, reaches 366 m. Nobody lives there; you need a permit to land.

It is the perfect emblem for the subject. Even the place we named after the far side of the world doesn’t quite reach it.

Why it matters · what to notice on the map

Read the red, then read the emptiness

The red is thin and clustered. Three regions carry almost all of it. Everywhere else on Earth, land is opposite water.
The Pacific is the reason. It is wide enough to sit opposite most of Asia by itself, which erases what would otherwise be the biggest overlap on the planet.
North and south don’t match. Most land is north of the equator; most of what lies opposite it is Southern Ocean. Antipodal geometry punishes that asymmetry.
The two rings on the map are antipodes of each other: the pole of the land hemisphere near Nantes, and the pole of the water hemisphere near the Bounty Islands. One is 47% land. The other is 89% ocean.
It has practical edges: antipodal pairs are the maximum-latency case for undersea cables and satellite relays, the hardest routing problem in aviation, and — for seismologists — the place where energy from a great earthquake reconverges after travelling every path around the globe.

Sources & notes

Wikipedia, “Antipodes” (accessed Aug 2026) — 15% of land is antipodal to land ≈ 4.4% of Earth’s surface; the three largest antipodal land regions; Borneo; Australia’s Atlantic antipodes; the city pairs listed here.
Wikipedia, “Land and water hemispheres” (accessed Aug 2026) — Land-hemisphere centre 47°13′N 1°32′W near Nantes — 47% land, holding 80.1% of Earth’s land. Water-hemisphere centre 47°13′S 178°28′E near the Bounty Islands — 89% ocean, 6% land, 5% ice. A separate 1913 determination places the centres at Île Dumet, France, and its antipode.
Wikipedia, “Antipodes Islands” (accessed Aug 2026) — 21 km²; 860 km southeast of Stewart Island/Rakiura; first sighted 25 March 1800 by Capt. Henry Waterhouse, HMS Reliance; highest point Mount Galloway, 366 m; true antipode lies just off the Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre — New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Islands inscription, which includes the Antipodes Islands.
Twelve Mile Circle (howderfamily.com), “Closest Antipodal National Capitals” — Taipei and Asunción — each about 86 km (53 miles) from the other’s antipode; the closest antipodal pair of national capitals.
NOAA National Ocean Service — About 71% of Earth’s surface is ocean, 29% land.
IUGG / WGS 84 reference ellipsoid — Mean Earth diameter 12,742 km; mean circumference 40,030 km, giving 20,015 km as half a great circle.
USends.com, “Colorado’s land antipodes” — The only land-to-land antipodes of the contiguous United States: two small patches of rangeland near Lamar and Kit Carson, Colorado.
lovebigisland.com, “Antipodes of Hawaii” — Hawai‘i Island lies opposite the Okavango region of Botswana; Hilo is antipodal to Nxai Pan National Park.
Note — DERIVED, not measured: the four-way surface budget (46.4% ocean-opposite-ocean, 24.6% ocean-opposite-land, 24.6% land-opposite-ocean, 4.4% land-opposite-land) is arithmetic from the 29% land figure and the 4.4% land-opposite-land figure.
Note — ILLUSTRATIVE: the “~62%” for the Iberian Peninsula is an eyeball estimate from the antipodal overlay, not a published measurement.
Note — The map is a hand-simplified schematic. Coastlines are generalised, so the red overlap regions are computed from that generalised outline — their shapes are indicative, their existence and location are real. An alternative published estimate puts land-opposite-land nearer 3% of Earth’s surface rather than 4.4%.