Point on Earth that is most distant from a cache

December 8, 2007

Where is it? Distance from cache(s)? Which cache(s)?

Can these questions be easily answered? ... or answered at all?

StumpWater

Apologies in advance if this is a repeat of a thread from April 1892. I'm new here.

Most likely in the Paciic Ocean somewhere, I'd guess.

December 8, 2007

Interesting question... and I have no idea!

December 8, 2007

Now I'm curious! Find it and somebody will place a cache there.

December 9, 2007

I'm just guessing, but it's probably in the middle of the ocean. I'd be more interested to know which point on land is the farthest from any cache.

1k · December 9, 2007

Would this not be calculated with a bit of simple math on the latitude and longitude?

Make a plus a minus for one and add or subtract 90 for the other?

Something like that?

2.7k · December 9, 2007

Would this not be calculated with a bit of simple math on the latitude and longitude?

Make a plus a minus for one and add or subtract 90 for the other?

Something like that?

Borrowed from About.com

About.com

How do you find an antipode or point on the opposite side of the earth?

The antipode is the point on the opposite side of the earth from another point - the place you'd end up if you were able to dig directly through the earth.

Take the latitude of the place you want to find the antipode of and convert it to the opposite hemisphere. For example, we'll use Memphis. Memphis is located at approximately 35° North latitude. The antipode of Memphis will be at 35° South latitude.

Then, take the longitude of the place you want to find the antipode of and subtract the longitude from 180. Antipodes are always 180° of longitude away. Memphis is located at approximately 90° West longitude so we take 180-90=90. This new 90° we convert to degrees East and we have our location of Memphis' antipode - 35°S 90°E - in the Indian Ocean far to the west of Australia.

1k · December 9, 2007

Yep, I thought so.

And I'm still not so sure about that magnetic water thing, either. But that's another story.

19k · December 9, 2007

Where is it? Distance from cache(s)? Which cache(s)?

Apologies in advance if this is a repeat of a thread from April 1892. I'm new here.

This forum didn't exist until July of 1892, so you're good.

I think the answer would probably be a maximum security prison. But I could be wrong... they may well have geocaching there too. I'm not sure I'd want to be looking for any micros there, though!

1k · December 9, 2007

I think the answer would probably be a maximum security prison. But I could be wrong... they may well have geocaching there too. I'm not sure I'd want to be looking for any micros there, though!

A maximum security prison at the bottom of the ocean...now THAT's innovative!

You may be ON to something THERE!!

December 9, 2007

I'm thinking what the OP was asking for was the point on Earth that is most distant from any cache.

1k · December 9, 2007

I'm thinking what the OP was asking for was the point on Earth that is most distant from any cache.

Ah! Looking back at the initial post I believe you are correct.

Hmm. Perhaps, in addition to listing the new caches, the weekly email update can include a list of cache-negligent areas where we need to go to place them.

December 9, 2007

"I'm thinking what the OP was asking for was the point on Earth that is most distant from any cache."

Yep, that's what I meant. Gotta be in the Pacific somewhere.

Also interesting would be if the geocaching site could product "Cache Density Maps" ... kinda like weather radar. Black = highest density of caches (above some threshold), Red, Orange, etc. ... down to white, or something along those lines.

StumpWater

20.7k · December 9, 2007

There once was a really good thread on this subject. A quick forum search on 'antipode' should turn it up.

3k · December 9, 2007

While playing around with the standard 'Hide and Seek' feature on the site, I learned two things:

1) The Hide and Seek feature only returns a list of caches if any can be found within 1000 miles from the specified search point. If your search point is 1000.1 miles (or more) from a cache, the search returns no caches.

2) There are plenty of places on the planet where there are no caches within 1000 miles.

I did locate one interesting spot that is exactly 1000 miles from the two nearest caches. That spot is southwest of Easter Island and southeast of Pitcairn Island in the Pacific Ocean at S 37° 32.620 W 121° 27.865.

The nearest cache to the northeast is Easter Island Cache (which claims to be "The most remote cache in the world"). The nearest cache to the northwest is Clipper Odyssey Pitcairn Cache (which may not even be there anymore, but it is still listed).

December 9, 2007

Marion Island @ 46 52.6S 37 51.5E has 2 caches which have never been found.

American Samoa has 1 cache (GC156RP) and has been found.

Diego Garcia has 4 caches (Indian Ocean)

Now for islands that are far from anywhere, I will list 3 that have no caches.

Kerguelen: 49 20S 70 20E

Inaccessable: 37 17S 12 40W

Amsterdam/St. Paul near 37 50S 77 35E

One of the most remote caches in Antarctica is Cone Z (GCKM8M) which is the southernmost active volcano on the planet.

5.3k · December 9, 2007

Antipodal map:

1k · December 9, 2007

Antipodal map:

That's awesome!

I wonder if there is an interactive one , or an interactive site, where you can click on the map or put in coordinates and it will provide the antipode coordinates for you.

1.2k · December 9, 2007

I've got a pretty good guess.

37° 6'29.69"S

12°17'16.36"W

The remote island of Tristan Da Cunha

I've been meaning to launch a travel bug called "Tristan Da Cunha or Bust!"

5.3k · December 9, 2007

I wonder if there is an interactive one , or an interactive site, where you can click on the map or put in coordinates and it will provide the antipode coordinates for you.

Easy to do yourself:

Swap the N/S on the latitude

Add or subtract 180 from the longitude (watch your +/- at 0 and 180)

3.9k · December 9, 2007

Where is it? Distance from cache(s)? Which cache(s)?

Apologies in advance if this is a repeat of a thread from April 1892. I'm new here.

This forum didn't exist until July of 1892, so you're good...

You are sooo wrong! I used the Retro Wayback machine to look at the earliest version of the forum, and it was started on May 12, 1892, admittedly at a slightly different web address and using different forum software.

1k · December 10, 2007

You are sooo wrong! I used the Retro Wayback machine to look at the earliest version of the forum, and it was started on May 12, 1892, admittedly at a slightly different web address and using different forum software.

In fact here is Jeremy's great great grandfather.

19k · December 10, 2007

This forum didn't exist until July of 1892, so you're good...

You are sooo wrong! I used the Retro Wayback machine to look at the earliest version of the forum, and it was started on May 12, 1892, admittedly at a slightly different web address and using different forum software.

July? Did I say JULY? That's what happens when I post so late at night. I COURSE it was May 12, 1892. Everybody knows that. Right?

December 10, 2007

Hi so you want to drill straght though the earth goto Google Maps and a feature of

there's lets you place on the map anywhere in the world an it shows you where you come out.

19k · December 10, 2007

While playing around with the standard 'Hide and Seek' feature on the site, I learned two things:

1) The Hide and Seek feature only returns a list of caches if any can be found within 1000 miles from the specified search point. If your search point is 1000.1 miles (or more) from a cache, the search returns no caches.

2) There are plenty of places on the planet where there are no caches within 1000 miles.

I did locate one interesting spot that is exactly 1000 miles from the two nearest caches. That spot is southwest of Easter Island and southeast of Pitcairn Island in the Pacific Ocean at S 37° 32.620 W 121° 27.865.

The nearest cache to the northeast is Easter Island Cache (which claims to be "The most remote cache in the world"). The nearest cache to the northwest is Clipper Odyssey Pitcairn Cache (which may not even be there anymore, but it is still listed).

Isn't/wasn't there one buried by deep-sea submarine by the volcanic vents in the deep Pacific trenches? Seems to me, if I remember right, that it was a yellow rubber duckie, and it cost about as much as a modest home to get to it.

19k · December 10, 2007

The nearest cache to the northeast is Easter Island Cache (which claims to be "The most remote cache in the world").

... and it has another cache, placed one day before it by another cacher, 3 miles to the north. Still, it sure would be awesome to try those!!

3.8k · December 10, 2007

A maximum security prison at the bottom of the ocean...now THAT's innovative!

You mean Australia.

crash_test_dummies results are pretty cool, and one of them is still unfound. I wonder if there are any others of equal or greater distance?

Edited December 10, 2007 by robert

7.2k · December 10, 2007

Diego Garcia has 4 caches (Indian Ocean)

This is one place I thought of. I shouldn't have been surprised there are caches there--considering there's not much to do there. I was stationed there for 14 months more than 20 years ago.

1k · December 10, 2007

Hi so you want to drill straght though the earth goto Google Maps and a feature of

there's lets you place on the map anywhere in the world an it shows you where you come out.

See! THAT's a cool way to find an antipode!

3.1k · December 10, 2007

You are sooo wrong! I used the Retro Wayback machine to look at the earliest version of the forum, and it was started on May 12, 1892, admittedly at a slightly different web address and using different forum software.

In fact here is Jeremy's great great grandfather.

<pic snipped>

Actually, we go back quite a bit further than that even.

I believe he's reading a treatise on whether caches can be placed in Spanish territories without permission.

20.7k · December 10, 2007

There once was a really good thread on this subject. A quick forum search on 'antipode' should turn it up.

I finally got around to doing that search.

Here's an old thread on this subject. Within the thread is a link to even more threads.

1.7k · December 10, 2007

Where is it? Distance from cache(s)? Which cache(s)?

Can these questions be easily answered? ... or answered at all?

Pretty easy to do, in theory. You'd have to use a coordinate system besides lat-long, since the distance between degrees of longitude is not constant. Can't think of a good coordinate system off the top of my head though. Once that's done, you can calculate the distance between caches in a matrix. The problem is the size of this matrix. From the geocaching.com homepage, it says there are 493,323 caches. There would be 243,367,582,329 elements in this matrix.

I have a program that could do the job and the size of the distance matrix would probably be limited only by whatever the largest size table MS Access can accommodate. Actually, I see that this program has a summary mode that will just list the max and min distance between caches for each cache, so the only concern would be the number of rows/caches in the table. The program could tell me the most isolated cache, and then I could manually check to see the distance between that isolated cache and the surrounding ones. Might be something fun for me to try with some pocket query data. This geography nerd is excited.

December 10, 2007

Before this slips off the bottom of the page without an adequate answer; this is what my research has come up with: Amsterdam Island French Territory @ 37* 51'S 77* 31.5E Sparrowhawks answer (Tristan Da Cunha) is only 1727 miles from the South African coast.

From Amsterdam Island:

Most antipodal cache- Soapweed (GCZCTJ) in Colorado

Closest cache - Marion Island Tumulus Field (GC13KHH) 2099 miles

next closest - Cape Leeuwin GCH843 Western Australia 2103 miles

3rd closest - Heads Up GCTV77 Diego Garcia 2125 miles

All of the Antarctic caches are more than 3500 miles from Amsterdam Island.

If you can find a cache closer than 1727 miles to this island let me know and I'll give kudos to Sparrowhawk.

Great Circle distances are easily determined by using Ed Williams Great Circle calculator which I use as a clue to solving 2 of my puzzle caches.

In 1892 the English and the French were using the original GPS: a sextant, a clock, and the sun at high noon.

The school they attended was at the SW point of Portugal and was headed by Henry the Navigator.

December 11, 2007

I wonder if there is an interactive one , or an interactive site, where you can click on the map or put in coordinates and it will provide the antipode coordinates for you.

Easy to do yourself:

Swap the N/S on the latitude

Add or subtract 180 from the longitude (watch your +/- at 0 and 180)

FYI For your amusement: an INTERACTIVE ANTIPODAL GOOGLE MASH-UP:

http://www.ubasics.com/dighole/

December 11, 2007

Thanks, tomfuller & Quill !

StumpWater

1k · December 11, 2007

FYI For your amusement: an INTERACTIVE ANTIPODAL GOOGLE MASH-UP:

http://www.ubasics.com/dighole/

That is PERFECT! That is EXACTLY what I was talking about.

Thanks!

:unsure:

December 11, 2007

A maximum security prison at the bottom of the ocean...now THAT's innovative!

You mean Australia.

Yep! We all still walk around dragging our Ball & Chain.

5.6k · December 11, 2007

Before this slips off the bottom of the page without an adequate answer; this is what my research has come up with: Amsterdam Island French Territory @ 37* 51'S 77* 31.5E Sparrowhawks answer (Tristan Da Cunha) is only 1727 miles from the South African coast.

From Amsterdam Island:

Most antipodal cache- Soapweed (GCZCTJ) in Colorado

Closest cache - Marion Island Tumulus Field (GC13KHH) 2099 miles

next closest - Cape Leeuwin GCH843 Western Australia 2103 miles

3rd closest - Heads Up GCTV77 Diego Garcia 2125 miles

All of the Antarctic caches are more than 3500 miles from Amsterdam Island.

If you can find a cache closer than 1727 miles to this island let me know and I'll give kudos to Sparrowhawk.

Great Circle distances are easily determined by using Ed Williams Great Circle calculator which I use as a clue to solving 2 of my puzzle caches.

In 1892 the English and the French were using the original GPS: a sextant, a clock, and the sun at high noon.

The school they attended was at the SW point of Portugal and was headed by Henry the Navigator.

Cascade Pistache - First cache in Rodrigues (GC15QDA) is only 1518 miles

8k · December 11, 2007

Before this slips off the bottom of the page without an adequate answer; this is what my research has come up with: Amsterdam Island French Territory @ 37* 51'S 77* 31.5E Sparrowhawks answer (Tristan Da Cunha) is only 1727 miles from the South African coast.

From Amsterdam Island:

Most antipodal cache- Soapweed (GCZCTJ) in Colorado

Closest cache - Marion Island Tumulus Field (GC13KHH) 2099 miles

next closest - Cape Leeuwin GCH843 Western Australia 2103 miles

3rd closest - Heads Up GCTV77 Diego Garcia 2125 miles

All of the Antarctic caches are more than 3500 miles from Amsterdam Island.

If you can find a cache closer than 1727 miles to this island let me know and I'll give kudos to Sparrowhawk.

Great Circle distances are easily determined by using Ed Williams Great Circle calculator which I use as a clue to solving 2 of my puzzle caches.

In 1892 the English and the French were using the original GPS: a sextant, a clock, and the sun at high noon.

The school they attended was at the SW point of Portugal and was headed by Henry the Navigator.

Using search with geocaching.com Google maps I found the closest cache to Amsterdam Island is a puzzle cache GC3895 HI EPE at 1071 miles. But readers of this thread might realize that this cache has an antipode in Georgia, USA - wonder what the solution to the puzzle is. However there is a cache on the island of Rodrigues, Cascade Pistache - First cache in Rodrigues GC15QDA, that is 1511 miles from Amsterdam Island so Tristan Da Cunha may still be the winner. The closest cache I found to Tristan Da Cunha is on So. Georgia Island, Shackleton's Rest GCZ8ZK, at 1651.8 miles.

Edited December 11, 2007 by tozainamboku

6.4k · December 11, 2007

You guys are totally amazing

1.1k · December 11, 2007

So, to find the point on earth that is most distant from a cache, draw a line from GC15QDA on Tristan Da Cunha to Shackleton's Rest (GCZ8ZK) on So. Georgia Island. The sacred point is the halfway point on that line.

December 11, 2007

Probably somewhere in the Sahara or Gobi deserts...

1.2k · December 11, 2007

So, to find the point on earth that is most distant from a cache, draw a line from GC15QDA on Tristan Da Cunha to Shackleton's Rest (GCZ8ZK) on So. Georgia Island. The sacred point is the halfway point on that line.

Wait a minute. GC15QDA is not on Tristan Da Cunha. Wrong ocean.

I don't think Tristan has any caches on it to start with, which is why my future "Tristan Da Cunha or Bust!" TB is going to be a little cache container - it will want to be the first cache on that very remote island.

2.7k · December 12, 2007

"I'm thinking what the OP was asking for was the point on Earth that is most distant from any cache."

Yep, that's what I meant. Gotta be in the Pacific somewhere.

Also interesting would be if the geocaching site could product "Cache Density Maps" ... kinda like weather radar. Black = highest density of caches (above some threshold), Red, Orange, etc. ... down to white, or something along those lines.

StumpWater

Reporting in from the middle of the Pacific Ocean (The Hawaiian Islands). Yes, there are caches here. Although there aren't as many here as there are in other places. Most likely due to the serious lack of MicroSpew.

December 12, 2007

After some more research, the on land answer to your question may be in the Northern hemisphere.

I can't find any caches closer than 1830 miles from 75*N 91*E in northern Russia.

There are some islands off the northern coast of Russia. The closest cache I found was along the Trans-Siberia Railway at the Alexander III monument.

See what you can do with this location.

8k · December 12, 2007

GCR3RC To idols of " Seven brothers " is 1465 miles from N75 E91 and in fact GC5803 As North As It Gets on Ellsmere Island in the Canadian Arctic is only 1523 miles away so going further north won't be anymore remote.

December 12, 2007

Going farther east will get you to a more remote spot. I've settled on 71* 30N X 141* 25EThe closest 3 caches I could come up with were 1560 to 1600 miles from here. The closest I could find was Toothy Travel Bug Cache (GC7584) in Alaska. GC12DHJ in Russia is a little over 1600 miles as is GC5803 As Far North as it Gets.

If you find a cache in Alaska any closer, I can adjust these coords about 30 miles west and still be in the range of 1560 miles.

December 12, 2007

For me, the point on Earth most distant from a cache is -

anywhere within a 1 meter radius from GZ of a cleverly hidden micro.

:unsure:

8k · December 12, 2007

Going farther east will get you to a more remote spot. I've settled on 71* 30N X 141* 25EThe closest 3 caches I could come up with were 1560 to 1600 miles from here. The closest I could find was Toothy Travel Bug Cache (GC7584) in Alaska. GC12DHJ in Russia is a little over 1600 miles as is GC5803 As Far North as it Gets.

If you find a cache in Alaska any closer, I can adjust these coords about 30 miles west and still be in the range of 1560 miles.

GCPN1H Bukhta Staraya Veselaya in Russia is only 883 miles from 71° 30N X 141° 25E. I will point out the I couldn't use the Geocaching.com Google map technique because of a bug already reported by a cacher in New Zealand. If your region spans 180° longitude, it returns no caches.

1.2k · December 15, 2007

Here's a Wiki article that could serve as inspiration: clicky

Point on Earth that is most distant from a cache

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