There is a point in the South Pacific from which it is 2,688 kilometres to the nearest land in every direction. Anyone who is there often has the closest humans not on the water but 400 kilometres overhead, on the International Space Station.
The place is officially called the oceanic pole of inaccessibility and unofficially Point Nemo, after the captain in Jules Verne's novel. It lies at 48°52.6′ south and 123°23.6′ west. The three closest points of land are an island in the Pitcairn group to the north, an islet near Easter Island to the north-east and an island off Antarctica to the south. All three are practically the same distance away, and that is not a coincidence but the definition: the point was not discovered but calculated, as the spot with the greatest possible distance from any coast.
Where spacecraft fall
That remoteness is exactly what makes the point useful. Since 1971 space agencies have deliberately brought retired satellites and space stations down in this region. Close to 300 objects lie there on the sea floor, among them the Soviet space station Mir.
Unreachability here is not a property. It is the function.
— TerraTally · Planet desk
The reason is a sober one. Large spacecraft do not burn up completely on re-entry. Parts survive and hit the Earth, and where the individual fragments land cannot be steered. They spread across a long, narrow corridor. The only thing that can be steered is the moment of re-entry, and that determines which part of the Earth the corridor runs over. The moment is chosen so that the debris arrives where there is least of anything. Point Nemo is that place. The procedure is called a controlled re-entry, and for large objects it has long been part of planning a mission rather than only of ending one.
At a glance
2,688 km
to the nearest land
1971
first targeted re-entry in the region
~300
objects on the sea floor
The International Space Station is to take the same route at the end of its service life. It is the largest object ever built in Earth orbit, and its controlled descent has been planned for years, not as an emergency but as a final work step. The station from which that empty patch is looked down on today will end up in it.
That a place becomes a dumping ground this way is not uncontested. The region counts as low in nutrients and correspondingly low in species, which from the space agencies' point of view makes it the suitable choice. Low in species does not mean empty, though, and the long-term effect of the material deposited there has not been conclusively studied. Measuring it would mean getting there first, and the very difficulty of getting there was the reason for the choice. A place nobody passes is also a place almost nobody collects data on.
Point Nemo therefore remains a strange special case of geography: a point defined solely by its distance from everything else, and given a purpose for precisely that reason. The most remote place on Earth is the only one where something can be dropped without hitting anything.