Core77

Interactive Map Shows You the Exact Opposite End of the Globe From You

The Antipodes Map shows you where you'd wind up if you dug straight down

By Rain Noe - August 17, 2017

in Visual Communication | UX

This is one of my dogs, Betsy, right before she starts furiously digging. She does it every time I take her to the beach and I joke that she's trying to get back to Japan, where her breed, the Shiba Inu, originates from.

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But assuming Betsy tunneled straight down from this New York beach and all the way through the planet, somehow managing to withstand the heat at the core of the Earth, would she wind up in Japan? When I was growing up in America it was common knowledge that digging straight down would land you in China. All of us eight-year-olds agreed this was true.

Well, now the folks behind the Antipodes Map show you precisely where you'd wind up if you tunneled directly through the Earth. I entered the zip code of the Core77 offices, not far from my apartment and "started digging."

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Here's where I wound up:

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Darnit.

If you want to try it yourself, click here.

Lastly I'll say that as a travel lover, I can handle flights to L.A. or Stuttgart. But anytime I've had to fly from JFK to Narita—a 14-hour ordeal if you're lucky—I found myself wishing that engineers had bored a tunnel through the Earth, directly from downtown Manhattan to Shibuya Station, and come up with some elevator (or Hyperloop, nowadays) that I could ride. It would have to be faster in a straight line, no? And if we went point-to-point, i.e. NYC to Tokyo, we could avoid that pesky molten core.

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Rodrigo Lauret

7 years ago

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From Madrid to New Zealand straight!

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Donald Jones

7 years ago

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Gibraltar and Auckland in a direct line. Tell me the British didn't plan that one.

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Kivi Shapiro

7 years ago

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Nifty trivium: if the Earth were a sphere, and you dug a perfectly straight tunnel from any point on the surface to any other point no matter how near or far, and you travelled through the tunnel using only the force of gravity, and there were no resistance or friction...then it would take you 42 minutes to make the trip. True story.

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