Take a dip in Point Nemo, the most isolated corner of the ocean on Earth

Do you find that there are always too many people at the municipal swimming pool?

As the Yorkshire Post reports , do as explorer Chris Brown and his son Mika do: go swimming where no one will nudge you, at the “furthest point in the ocean from any land,” in the South Pacific.

Its name: Point Nemo. Which means “nobody” in Latin.

This feat, explains The Times of India , is part of the challenge that the 61-year-old Briton has set himself: to reach the “eight poles of inaccessibility” on the surface of the globe.

Seven are terrestrial: these are the furthest points from the ocean, on each continent, including the Arctic and Antarctica. Point Nemo is the opposite: it is “the oceanic pole of inaccessibility.”

The closest land points to this inhospitable maritime nook are 2,688 km away. Among them, the BBC specifies , figure “an uninhabited atoll, Ducie Island, which is part of the Pitcairn Islands,” a British colony. The location of Point Nemo was only recently defined, in 1992, by the Croatian-Canadian engineer Hrvoje Lukatela.

Apart from a few intrepid sailors on a round-the-world trip, almost no one frequents the area.

“In fact,” the BBC continues, “the closest humans are often a very different kind of explorer: the astronauts aboard the International Space Station [ISS], who are only 415 km [from Point Nemo] when they fly over.”

And that's precisely where the ISS will end its journey, in 2031.

Since the 1970s, Point Nemo has been used as a “space graveyard”.

The Soviets, but also the Americans and the Japanese, directed many satellites and other obsolete spacecraft there, notably the Mir station, which now line its abyssal depths.

Funds which, in literature, are not entirely deserted.

Jules Verne, says the Big Think website , located in this area “the base of the Nautilus ”, Captain Nemo’s submarine, hero of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Hence the name chosen by Hrvoje Lukatela.

And in 1928, in The Call of Cthulhu, the American science fiction writer HP Lovecraft placed there what he described as “the supreme terror of our universe” : the terrifying lost city submerged by the hideous giant monster Cthulhu, a mixture of octopus, human and dragon.

“There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, deep in their green, oozing vaults,” wrote Lovecraft. Finally, even at Point Nemo, beware of elbowing.

[This story was originally published on March 27, 2024, and republished on August 14, 2025]