NGM Blog Central - Polar Opposites - National Geographic Magazine

It’s a childhood riddle: Where would you end up if you dug a hole to the other side of the world? (Of course, that’s assuming one could survive tunneling through the molten innards of the Earth.) Kids in the United States are usually led to imagine that they’d pop up like groundhogs in a rice field in China. Wrong. One look at a map of antipodes—places on exact opposite sides of the globe—shows that an American digger would end up in the Indian Ocean. As for sandbox fantasists in China, some would luck out and emerge on land in Chile.

The word “antipodes” in Latin means “those with the feet opposite,” a reference to the old European belief that people south of the Equator had feet growing from their heads. They should have been thinking fins: From most locations in the Northern Hemisphere, the opposite spot is water, since oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth.

Playing antipodes produces amusing pairings. Bermudans would still enjoy sea breezes by Perth, Australia, but climate shock would await Timbuktu’s desert dwellers, who’d come up near tropical Fiji. And as one player says, “Imagine the disappointment of someone digging their way out of Siberia and ending up in Antarctica.” —Tom O’Neill

Posted by National Geographic Staff | Comments (1)
Filed Under: Geography, Wide Angle

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NRDanielle
May 29, 2009 2PM #

If one could servive the million degree celcius of earth at the center...he shall ended up felt very mercifully bless up in Antartica.

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