If you dug through the Earth, where would you end up?

In fact, most places on Earth have their opposite point located in the middle of an ocean, according to IFLScience on October 1st.

How do we determine the point opposite to Earth?

Using geographic data from Natural Earth along with NASA's famous "Blue Marble" imagery, an interactive platform called ThroughEarth shows that only about 15% of the world's landmass has land directly opposite it.

That means if you dug a straight line across the Earth from most points on land, the end point would be under the sea.

For example, starting from Los Angeles (USA), the opposite point would be in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 1,530km from the nearest landmass.

If starting from London (England), the straight line across the Earth would end in the South Pacific, about 740km from New Zealand.

If you want to "sneak" out of Shanghai ( China ), the corresponding starting point would have to be somewhere in Argentina.

According to Martin Krpelan, who runs ThroughEarth.com, the calculation to determine the opposite point of a location on Earth is quite simple.

"The polar point of a location on Earth is calculated by reversing the latitude (North to South and South to North) and shifting the longitude 180 degrees, then normalizing back to the range of -180 to 180 degrees," Krpelan explained.

The interesting part lies in the next step: ThroughEarth compares the geography around both points to determine whether the opposite location is land or ocean. This allows the platform to show how much "water" our planet has.

It is nearly impossible to dig through the Earth.

The possibility of humans actually digging through the Earth to travel from one side to the other is almost impossible.

The deepest man-made borehole to date is the Kola superdeep well in Russia, reaching 12,263 meters. This figure is equivalent to only about 0.2% of the distance from the surface to the Earth's core, not to mention drilling to the other side.

At greater depths, the temperature and pressure increase dramatically.

Therefore, instead of undertaking an impossible journey through the Earth's interior, mapping tools like ThroughEarth allow us to visually imagine what lies on the other side of the Earth.