What is an antipode?
Your antipode is the point on the exact opposite side of the Earth. Here’s how to find it, why it’s usually in the ocean, and which cities are almost perfect opposites.
Your antipode is the spot on the exact opposite side of the planet from you. A straight line from your feet through the center of the Earth would come out right there. The word comes from Greek: anti (opposite) and podes (feet), so people standing at antipodes are standing feet to feet.
How to find yours
You only need two steps:
- Flip your latitude. If you’re 34° north of the equator, your antipode is 34° south.
- Turn your longitude around by 180°. If you’re 84° west, your antipode is 96° east (180 − 84).
That’s it. Atlanta (33.7°N, 84.4°W) has its antipode at 33.7°S, 95.6°E, in the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia. Find yours on the map, or click anywhere to try other places.
Why it’s usually water
Water covers about 71% of Earth’s surface, and the continents happen to be arranged so that very few of them sit opposite each other. Using the map data on this site, only about 13% of land has land on its exact opposite side. Most tunnels from dry land end in the ocean.
Some of the big exceptions:
- Spain and Portugal ↔ New Zealand, the most famous match.
- Argentina and Chile ↔ China and Mongolia.
- Indonesia ↔ Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador.
- Peru ↔ Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia.
- Hawaii ↔ Botswana.
Fun fact: digthru.to is a Tongan web address, and most of Tonga’s opposite side lands in the Sahara, in Algeria.
Cities that are almost perfect opposites
A few pairs of cities sit within a few kilometers of each other’s antipodes. (We found 448 pairs of big cities within 250 km; browse them all in Cities that are exact opposites.)
| City | Opposite city | How close |
|---|---|---|
| Padang, Indonesia | Esmeraldas, Ecuador | about 4 km |
| Yueyang, China | La Rioja, Argentina | about 6 km |
| Chincha Alta, Peru | Siem Reap, Cambodia | about 6 km |
| Tauranga, New Zealand | Jaén, Spain | about 9 km |
| Córdoba, Spain | Hamilton, New Zealand | about 13 km |
The Antipodes Islands
There’s a tiny group of uninhabited islands southeast of New Zealand actually called the Antipodes Islands. British sailors named them because they lie close to the antipode of Greenwich, in London. In Britain, “the Antipodes” became a nickname for Australia and New Zealand.
Distance to your antipode
Your antipode is as far away as anything on Earth can be. Walking there along the surface is about 20,000 km, half the way around the world, whichever direction you go. Tunneling through the center is shorter, about 12,740 km.
Earth is slightly squashed, wider at the equator than pole to pole, so the exact tunnel length depends on where you start. A tunnel from the North Pole to the South Pole is about 43 km shorter than one between two points on the equator.