Finding Nemo

There is a place on Earth where the next nearest human is in space. What the?

A few weeks ago I attended an evening with British astronaut, Major Tim Peake, at the Brighton Dome. As a space nerd, I was in my element, lapping up his stories and his telling of the historic timeline of human spaceflight. But it was Peake’s anecdotes from the International Space Station - some 250 miles above us - that fascinated the most. The ride out of the atmosphere to reach it, living in weightlessness on a mini city in the stars, the spacewalks looking down with a new, almost-unique perspective on his home. A home that had never appeared so small, so fragile, or so spectacular.

But, I hear you cry, what in the Bikini Bottom heck has space got to do with a blog about the sea?

Bare with.

One evening a few days later, locked into a particularly mind-numbing doomscroll on Instagram (ugh), something truly stopped me in my tracks. It was a post about ‘Point Nemo’, the single spot in the ocean that is the farthest away from any land. Essentially, the most remote place on our planet. The middle of the sea. Located in the heart of the Pacific, it is halfway along an imaginary line drawn between New Zealand’s east coast and the southern section of Chile.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it is about 2,688 kilometres away from the Pitcairn Islands to the north, the Easter Islands to the northeast, and Antarctica to the south.

Now, 2,688 kilometres, or 1,670 miles, is far. Really far. That’s roughly Dallas, Texas, to San Francisco, California. Or, from Scotland to Ibiza. Or, like driving from Brighton to Newquay in Cornwall and back again nearly three-and-a-half times. You get the idea.

If you found yourself there, there would be no one, in any direction, within 22 million square kilometres. Indeed, Nemo means, no one, or nobody, in Latin. I see what they did there.

[Speaking of the moniker, by the way, Point Nemo is named after - yes, you guessed it - Jules Verne’s mysterious and rebellious Captain Nemo from ‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’. A self-contained man with no interest in terrestrial affairs. I see what they did there, too.]

It is otherwise known as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Which, I’m quite sure, would be the name of my band’s debut album, if I had one. But we’ll come back to music later.

Imagine how alone you would feel. Imagine those distances with nothing but endless, open sea in front of you. Nothing on the horizon, no point of reference, no safety net or friendly faces. Just waves.

Right, yes, space. Okay, here it comes.

The headline of all of this is that Point Nemo is so isolated and remote, that the next nearest people are often those astronauts aboard the aforementioned International Space Station, floating above in zero gravity. How crazy is that? And it gets even crazier; deep in the comments section of that original post - oh yeah, I went there - some were alleging that Point Nemo doubled as a spaceship graveyard, a dumping ground for space agencies and their space junk. Unbelievable ramblings, surely. But the ensuing YouTube black hole I fell into confirmed just that.

Indeed, the seabed below Point Nemo is apparently the final, watery resting place to over 260 pieces of space shrapnel, including rockets, satellites, and even the remnants of the old Russian Space Station, MIR. It could even end up being the forever home of the ISS. NASA are planning to dump the football pitch-sized colossus right into the drink, potentially within the next five years. I found this shocking.

Leave it to human beings to, no matter what, sully the sea with our trash. Intergalactic, interplanetary or otherwise. Indeed, Sky News reports that, despite being as far away as you can get from the scourge of man’s negative influence, plastic is found.

Tiny polluting particles, or microplastics, were identified there, Ian Woods’ piece explained, calling it a “disturbing discovery”.

The area had never been specifically sampled before, but participants in a passing nearby yacht race zooming through this mysterious seascape “detected between nine and 27 pieces of microplastics per cubic metre”.

Sigh.

Travelling to this place, far away from conventional shipping routes, is no joke. With the highest of high seas to contend with, and unpredictably treacherous weather, it is a proper endurance test. One recently completed by British modern day explorer, Chris Brown, who made headlines (that I missed, clearly) earlier this year by not only reaching Point Nemo, but by taking a dip in its supposedly almost-lifeless waters.

See, scientists believe that Point Nemo is not only devoid of human life, but of virtually all life; a whirlpool of conflicting currents in the South Pacific block nutrient-rich waters in the area, meaning that it’s impossible for most living things to flourish, except some bacteria. The real Dead Sea.

Along the way to finally proving, unequivocally, that a group of humans had been to Point Nemo’s exact position, Brown and crew faced waves “the size of a standard detached house”, as well as an impromptu albatross attack when the mighty gull-like seabird and 20-30 of his mates came to say, “hello” - perhaps challenging that lack-of-life theory above. (Where there are seabirds, there is seafood.)

It’s another example of how much we think we know about the ocean, but how little we really do.

Back in space, I can’t help but think of my favourite image of Earth: the one looking down on the vast Pacific Ocean, where only the very edges of the globe give away any hint that there is terra firma on it at all. It’s all water, with little beauty spots of land freckled on its royal blue surface if you squint. When you look at Point Nemo from that zoomed out perspective, that’s what you see. Waterworld. A marvellous marine marble.

A reminder that ours is an ocean planet more than anything else.

I will leave you with the coolest fact about Point Nemo that I could find, as if all of the above wasn’t enough…

As a huge fan of the band Gorillaz (again, bare with), the genius cartoon art project of Damon Albarn, I learned that their third album, ‘Plastic Beach’, is based on a fictionalised version of Point Nemo.

According to Gorillaz lore (yep, that’s a thing), Plastic Beach - found at the exact same real-life coordinates as Point Nemo - was the band’s former recording studio, “created after various discarded items floated in the ocean and stuck to one another to conglomerate into one large landmass in the Pacific”.

It is said, Gorillaz Wiki continues, that “Plastic Beach looks almost idyllic from far away… though, as one draws closer, it becomes apparent that the island is just clustered trash”.

Ahh, it really brings it all together. And it’s been staring me in the face since 2010 when that record was first released. Maybe it’s about time I paid the place a visit myself.