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Where would you end up if you dug a hole through the Earth?

Dig straight down through the center of the planet and you’ll pop out at the exact opposite point, your antipode. For most people that’s the middle of an ocean. Here’s where every part of the world comes out.

Pick any spot on Earth, dig straight down through the center of the planet, and keep going. About 12,740 km later you’d pop out at the point exactly opposite where you started. Geographers call that point your antipode.

The surprising part is where those tunnels end. For most people on Earth, the answer is the middle of an ocean.

Find out where your own tunnel comes out →

The short answer, region by region

We flipped every country and US state through the center of the Earth and checked what lies on the other side. (How we did it is explained at the end.) Here’s what you’d find:

If you start digging in… You come out in…
The lower 48 US states The southern Indian Ocean, every single one
Hawaii Botswana (98%) and a sliver of Namibia
Alaska Mostly the Indian and Southern Oceans, with a little Antarctica (2%)
Canada Mostly the Indian Ocean, plus Antarctica (15%)
Mexico The Indian Ocean (100%)
United Kingdom, Germany, India The South Pacific Ocean (100%)
Japan The South Atlantic Ocean (100%)
Australia The North Atlantic Ocean, near Bermuda (100% water)
Spain New Zealand (27%) and the South Pacific
Argentina China (72%), Mongolia and Russia
Chile China (61%), Mongolia and Russia
The Philippines Brazil (86%) and Bolivia
Tonga Algeria (100%)

So the old playground idea of digging to China only works if you start in Argentina or Chile. From the United States you’d surface somewhere southwest of Australia, often more than a thousand kilometers from the nearest beach. (More on that in Could you really dig a hole to China?)

Fun fact: Only one US state comes out mostly on dry land: Hawaii, which flips onto the Kalahari in Botswana. From the other 49 states and DC you hit water, except for a sliver of northern Alaska that reaches Antarctica.

Why it’s almost always water

Two things stack the odds against you.

Most of the planet is ocean. About 71% of Earth’s surface is covered by water. In the map data this site uses, land covers about 29% of the globe.

The continents don’t line up. Even when you start on land, the spot opposite you is usually sea. Using the same data, we found that only about 13% of the world’s land has land on its exact opposite side. The rest of the time, your tunnel ends in the ocean.

That’s why, of the 242 countries and territories we checked, 180 come out entirely in water and only 32 land mostly on dry ground.

The places that do line up

A handful of regions are near-perfect matches:

  • Spain and Portugal ↔ New Zealand. About 53% of New Zealand flips onto Spain, and the cities of Córdoba (Spain) and Hamilton (New Zealand) are only about 13 km from being exact opposites.
  • Argentina and Chile ↔ China and Mongolia. This is the biggest land-to-land match on the planet.
  • Indonesia and Malaysia ↔ Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru. The equatorial belts of Southeast Asia and northern South America mirror each other.
  • Hawaii ↔ Botswana. A Pacific island chain lands in the middle of southern Africa.

We found 448 pairs of cities (each with at least 100,000 people) that sit within 250 km of each other’s exact opposite. The closest is Esmeraldas, Ecuador and Padang, Indonesia, only about 4 km apart. See them all in Cities that are exact opposites.

How far is it?

Your antipode is as far away as anything on Earth can be:

  • Walking there along the surface is about 20,000 km, half of the way around the world, whichever direction you go.
  • Tunneling straight through the center is only about 12,740 km, roughly the diameter of the Earth.

Earth is slightly squashed, wider at the equator than from pole to pole. So the exact tunnel length depends on where you start: a pole-to-pole tunnel is about 43 km shorter than one between two points on the equator.

On the way you’d pass through every layer of the planet: the crust, the mantle, the liquid outer core and the solid inner core at the center, which is around 5,000 to 6,000 °C. See Earth’s layers for the full trip.

Watch the dig through every layer →

How to find your own antipode

You don’t need a map, just your coordinates:

  1. Flip your latitude from north to south (or south to north). 34° N becomes 34° S.
  2. Turn your longitude around by 180°. If you’re at 84° W, your antipode is at 96° E (180 − 84).

Or skip the math: drop a pin on the map and we’ll draw the tunnel, tell you what’s on the other side, and show how far you’d be from the nearest land.

How we worked this out

The percentages on this page come from the map data behind this site (Natural Earth’s country borders and US Census state borders). For each country or state, we sampled points across its whole area, flipped each one to its antipode, and checked whether it landed on land or in the sea, weighting each point by the area it represents. The numbers are close approximations, not survey-grade measurements, and small islands can be missed by the sampling.

Sources