Point Nemo is a remote location in the Pacific Ocean, situated 3,000 miles north of Antarctica and 2,000 miles south of New Zealand. Because of its extreme isolation, the people who live closest to it are frequently the astronauts who are hundreds of miles above Earth on board the International Space Station. Because of its extreme remoteness, the ISS has chosen to rest there. When it retires in 2030, it will join other retired spacecraft in their aquatic cemetery.
Officially called an “oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” this watery graveyard for titanium fuel tanks and other high-tech space debris is better known to space junkies as Point Nemo, in honour of Jules Verne’s fictional submarine captain. According to CNN, spacefaring nations have been dumping their junk in the area around Point Nemo named after Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea,” since the 1970s.
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The most remote place on Earth is Point Nemo, sometimes referred to as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility or the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area. In 1992, Hrvoje Lukatela, a Russian engineer from Canada, pinpointed its exact coordinates.
Based on a 2019 study, this remote location has been the ultimate resting place for over 263 space debris pieces since 1971. Unlike immaculate monuments, these are probably dispersed over a large area and include prominent entries like NASA’s Skylab and Russia’s Mir space station.
“This is the largest ocean area without any islands. It is just the safest area where the long fall-out zone of debris after a re-entry fits into,” Holger Krag, Head of the Space Safety Programme Office at the European Space Agency told CNN.
Point Nemo lies beyond the jurisdiction of any state and lacks human presence, yet it bears the marks of human influence. Aside from the space debris resting on the ocean floor, microplastic particles were found in the waters as yachts participating in the Volvo Ocean Race traversed the area in 2018.
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