THE MOST REMOTE PLACE IN THE WORLD

Point Nemo is Earth's official "middle of nowhere." A lot seems to be going on there.

- Cullen Murphy

It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48 52.5291ᤩS 123 23.5116ᤩW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.

They had been sailing a 60-foot foiling boat, the Mālama, in the Ocean Race, a round-the-world yachting competition, and had passed near that very spot, halfway between New Zealand and South America. Now, two months later, they had paused briefly in Newport, Rhode Island, before tackling the final stretch across the Atlantic. (And the Mālama would win the race.) I spoke with some members of the five- person crew before going out with them for a sail on Narragansett Bay. When I asked about their experience at the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, they all brought up the weather.

With a test pilot’s understatement, the crew described the conditions as “significant” or “strong” or “noteworthy” (or, once, “incredibly note worthy”). The Southern Ocean, which girds the planet in the latitudes above Antarctica and below the other continents, has the worst weather in the world because its waters circulate without any landmass to slow them down. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the most powerful on Earth, a conveyor belt that never stops and that in recent years has been moving faster.