This is fun: If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop?
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At dinner in Urumqi in western China last spring, we asked our hostess if she had been taught, when a kid, that if she dug a hole she would get to the United States. No. Was she taught that if she dug a hole she would get to China? No, not that either.
When I ran it, it gave me the wrong location. Washington DC is opposite the sea 1000 miles WSW of Perth, a few hundred miles from Michael’s opposite point, not off the coast of Chile, as reported by the application.
I’m in the Indian Ocean, which makes sense.
Isaac Asimov wrote an essay years ago about holes through the earth. If I remember correctly, he said that there was no continent where digging a hole would end at another continent. It’s fairly easy to demonstrate by determining the latitude and longitude of the beginning point and checking the location of the opposite ending point. Sadly I can’t find the essay, I used to have most of his science essay collections but they disappeared one by one over the years. Anything that man wrote was worth reading.
ej: As I recall the essay, there was one exception – the southern tip of South America is antipodal to the northeastern part of Asia. (I’m trying to check this with an atlas; as far as I can tell, southeastern Argentina is opposite parts of northern China and Mongolia. I need a globe…)
Dale: it slapped me off the coast of Chile too. I’m thinking of getting a globe and a sharp stick to test 🙂