What is on the exact opposite side of the world?

Dig straight down through the centre of the Earth and you will, with overwhelming probability, come out in the sea. Only about 15% of land has land on the other side of it — some 4% of the Earth's total surface. The rest of the planet's land is opposite open ocean.

The point you would surface at is called your antipode: same latitude, opposite hemisphere, and 180 degrees around in longitude. It is always exactly half a circumference away — around 20,038 km, or 12,450 miles — which makes it the furthest anything on Earth can be from anything else.

Why almost every antipode is water

The Earth's land is badly distributed for this. Roughly two-thirds of it sits in the northern hemisphere, and a great deal of the southern hemisphere is the Pacific, the Southern Ocean and the South Atlantic. Opposite most of Europe, North America and Asia there is simply nothing.

London is a clean example. Its antipode is 51.5° south, 179.5° east — open South Pacific, several hundred kilometres from the nearest coastline. New York's antipode is in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Los Angeles surfaces in the Indian Ocean too, well south of Mauritius.

The exceptions cluster where southern land happens to line up with northern land: Spain and New Zealand, Southeast Asia and South America, and parts of China and Argentina or Chile.

The closest antipodal airport pairs

Computed across the full airport table, these are the pairs that come nearest to being true opposites. The final column is how far the second airport is from the first one's exact antipodal point — smaller is closer to perfect.

Málaga and Auckland, 74 km off, is the pairing most people find surprising — the Costa del Sol and New Zealand's largest city are, to within an hour's drive, on precisely opposite sides of the planet.

And for the major hubs, the answer is usually "nothing close":

Nobody flies it

There is no scheduled service between antipodal points, and there never has been. The reason is not range — the longest scheduled routes are already comfortably over 15,000 km — it is that antipodal pairs are almost never two places with demand between them. Da Nang to Arequipa is a route with no market.

Which also means the theoretical maximum flight, about 20,038 km, is unreachable in practice. The furthest anyone actually flies non-stop falls a good 4,000 km short of the geometry.

A curiosity that follows from it: on a great circle, the antipode is the one destination where every direction is the shortest direction. Set off from London on any bearing at all, keep going straight, and you arrive at the same point in the South Pacific having covered the same distance. Every other destination has exactly one shortest path; the antipode has infinitely many.

Where this sits on your own map

Antipodes are the reason a flight map looks emptier than it feels. Most people's flying is concentrated in one hemisphere, and the far side of their globe is not merely unvisited but largely unvisitable — there is nothing there to fly to.

If you are working out how many times around the Earth you have flown, the antipode is the useful yardstick for a single flight rather than a total: half a lap, one hop, and no airline offers it.

Every airport page on this site lists its own antipode and the nearest airport to it, computed the same way as the tables above.

Orbit draws your flights as arcs on a globe, so you can see which half of the planet you have actually been to. Download now.