Finding your Antipode

This compact single-purpose web page is a useful tool for finding your antipode — the point on the earth that you’d hit if you poked a stick through the middle of the earth from where you’re standing. Here’s mine:

My Antipode

To find your own antipode, simply load up Google Earth, search for your street address, and then right-click on the map once it’s zoomed to your location and select “Get Info.” You’ll see something like this:

Google Earth Screen Shot

Next, enter the values for latitude and longitude into this conversion tool and you’ll get a new latitude and longitude as a result:

Finally, go back to Google Earth and enter these values in the “Search” field, latitude first followed by a comma and then longitude. You can enter this using positive values for northern latitudes and negative values for southern ones (i.e. “-46.23576” for “46.23576 degrees south”) or you can append “N” or “S” to a positive value as appropriate (i.e. “46.23576 S”). Same thing for longitude: use positive values or “E” for “eastern” longitudes and negative values or “W” for western longitudes:

Google Earth Search

If all goes according to plan, the globe should spin around a half-turn and you’ll end up about as far away from where you’re standing as you can possibly get.

Comments

Martin R's picture
Martin R on January 16, 2007 - 16:34 Permalink

Interesting! My antipode is at 51.063794S, 166.254167W — south-east of New Zealand. The closest larger piece of land seem to be the Chatham Islands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C….

Rob's picture
Rob on January 16, 2007 - 19:12 Permalink

If you don’t need such high precision, Ze Frank’s Earth Sandwich tool, helps people put two pieces of bread on each side of the planet to make it a sandwich. Antipode sounds more scientific, however.

oliver's picture
oliver on January 17, 2007 - 00:03 Permalink

A beautiful illustration of how computers make everything harder. Twenty years ago you’d have a globe on our desk and in a tenth the time you’d get ten times the learning and no carpal tunnel.