Fun Fact

I had always assumed that Australia and North America were antipodal. Growing up, I thought that if I dug a hole straight through the center of the earth, I would come out in Australia. But it turns out that I’m wrong. Weather I started my hole in Massachusetts or California, I still would come out in the Indian Ocean, west of Australia.

I know this because of a few of fun tools I found online. The first one will tell you the latitude and longitude of your exact address. I discovered that I live at latitude 37.801647 north and 122.240237 west longitude.

The second tool is an antipode calculator. Plug in your hometown coordinates, and it will tell you the coordinates of the farthest place on the globe from where you live—your antipode. In my case, that’s 37.801647 S and 57.759763 E. If you want to know where in the world that is, go to this third tool, type in the new coordinates (western and southern latitudes are negative), and it will show you your antipode's location on a map.

It took me a while to figure out where in the world my antipode is, because Mapquest showed nothing but water until I zoomed way out. It turned out to be at the tip of a trench in the Indian Ocean, closer to South Africa than Australia.

Sorry, short post today. I have to go start filling in that big disappointing hole in my back yard.