Dig straight down from any US state and you hit… the ocean

The only state that hits dry land

Hawaii is the one exception. Flip the islands through the center of the Earth and about 98.3% of them land in Botswana, in the Kalahari, with the rest just over the border in Namibia. A tunnel from Honolulu would come out about 70 km northeast of the town of Ghanzi.

Alaska is the only other state that touches land at all: about 2.1% of it flips onto Antarctica. The rest comes out in the icy waters of the Southern and Indian Oceans.

Where everybody else ends up

The other 48 states and Washington, DC all come out in the southern Indian Ocean, a huge empty stretch of sea southwest of Australia. The East Coast flips toward Western Australia. The middle of the country lands near some of the loneliest islands on Earth, the French Kerguelen, Saint-Paul and Amsterdam islands, where the only people are a few dozen scientists and staff at research stations.

That gives the Rocky Mountain states the shortest swims. Dig from the middle of Montana and you’d surface about 203 km from the Kerguelen Islands. From Colorado, tiny Saint-Paul Island is about 270 km away. The Southeast gets the worst deal: Georgia’s tunnel ends about 1,701 km from the coast of Western Australia.