A feature article by Cullen Murphy in The Atlantic’s November 2024 issue [Apple News +] explores the oceanic pole of inaccessibility—the point on the globe furthest from any land. Known as Point Nemo, it’s at a spot in the South Pacific nearly 2,700 km from the nearest island where the weather is beyond fierce, the water so lacking in nutrients it’s a biological desert, and the closest human beings are often the astronauts in the International Space Station, which passes 250 km overhead every day. (That’s not a coincidence, by the way: Point Nemo will eventually be the ISS’s final resting place. The surrounding oceans have become a spaceship graveyard, a preferred target for controlled deorbits, precisely because they’re so far from land.)