Stand anywhere on Earth and imagine a straight line entering the ground at your feet, passing through the planet's centre, and emerging on the far side. The point where it comes out is your antipode — the single spot on Earth that is geometrically furthest from where you stand.
The word comes from Greek: anti (opposite) + podes (feet) — literally "those with their feet opposite." Ancient geographers imagined people on the other side of the globe walking "upside down" relative to themselves, soles pressed against theirs through the planet.
Finding an antipode needs no trigonometry, just two flips of your coordinates:
So Paris (48.86°N, 2.35°E) has its antipode at 48.86°S, 177.65°W — a patch of the Southern Ocean southeast of New Zealand, a couple of hundred kilometres from the aptly named Antipodes Islands.
Always the same distance, no matter where you start: about 20,015 km along the surface — half the Earth's circumference. Antipodal points have a curious property: because they sit at opposite ends of a diameter, every direction you set off in is equally short. North, south, into the sunrise — all great-circle routes to your antipode measure exactly the same. There is no "wrong way" to walk to the opposite side of the world.
Opposite geometry produces opposite conditions:
Water covers about 71% of the planet, and the continents are arranged with a strong bias: most land sits opposite ocean. By most estimates less than 15% of the world's land is antipodal to other land. If you live in Europe, North America, Africa or most of Asia, your antipode is almost certainly open sea. The lucky exceptions — parts of Spain opposite New Zealand, much of South America opposite East and Southeast Asia — are covered in our tour of the rare cities that are true antipodes of each other.
Want yours? Type your address into the Antigea home page and it will drill through the planet for you — showing the exact spot, the nearest land, the closest Street View, and what time it is over there right now.