Antipode Explorer
Dig straight down. Where do you come out?
Every antipode is exactly 20,015 kilometers away, half the Earth's circumference, no matter where you start. What is on the other side is almost always water: of 8 major cities checked here, only 3 have land at their antipode. Dig straight down from Madrid and you surface in New Zealand, about 160 km from Wellington. From Beijing you arrive in Argentina, near Bahía Blanca. From London you come out in the South Pacific Ocean, roughly 929 km from the nearest city. Around 71% of Earth's surface is water and most land sits in the northern hemisphere, so land-to-land antipodes are genuinely rare.
Your point (drag to spin, click to place)
40.4°N, 3.7°W: Spain
Straight through the Earth
40.4°S, 176.3°E: New Zealand
Dig straight down from Spain and you surface in New Zealand, exactly 20,015 km away (half the Earth's circumference, every single time).
Nearest named place to the antipode: Wellington (160 km away).
Shapes: Natural Earth (public domain). Water-body names: Natural Earth marine polygons. Cities: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).
About this visualization
About this data
The antipode is pure geometry: flip the latitude, shift the longitude by 180°. Naming what is there happens entirely offline against Natural Earth country and ocean shapes; when a point sits in unnamed water it says "the open ocean" rather than guessing. About 71% of Earth is water, which is why the other side is almost always blue.
Common questions
- What is an antipode?
- The antipode of a point is the place on the exact opposite side of the Earth: flip the latitude north to south, and shift the longitude by 180 degrees. Digging straight down through the center of the Earth would bring you out there.
- Why is the antipode almost always ocean?
- About 71% of the Earth's surface is water, and the land is unevenly distributed, with most of it in the northern hemisphere. Only a small fraction of land has land on the opposite side, which is why almost every antipode falls in open water.
- How far away is the antipode?
- Always 20,015 kilometers, or roughly 12,400 miles, which is half the Earth's circumference. The distance is identical from every point on the planet, because every antipode is by definition directly opposite through the centre.
- What is on the opposite side of the world from Spain?
- New Zealand. The antipode of Madrid falls at 40.4°S, 176.3°E, about 160 km from Wellington. Spain and New Zealand are one of the few land-to-land antipodal pairs anywhere, which is why the two turn up together in this kind of trivia so often.