Antipodes

The Greek word is attested in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, already referring to a spherical Earth, explaining the relativity of the terms "above" and "below": For if there were any solid body in equipoise at the centre of the universe, there would be nothing to draw it to this extreme rather than to that, for they are all perfectly similar; and if a person were to go round the world in a circle, he would often, when standing at the antipodes of his former position, speak of the same point as above and below; for, as I was saying just now, to speak of the whole which is in the form of a globe as having one part above and another below is not like a sensible man.The term is taken up by Aristotle (De caelo 308a.20), Strabo (Geographica 1.1.13), Plutarch (On the Malice of Herodotus 37) and Diogenes Laërtius (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers book 3), and was adopted into Latin as antipodes.

[9][10][11] Pomponius Mela, the first Roman geographer, asserted that the earth had two habitable zones, a North and South one, but that it would be impossible to get into contact with each other because of the unbearable heat at the Equator (De orbis situ 1.4).

Augustine asserted that "it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man.

"[13] In the Early Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville's widely read encyclopedia presented the term "antipodes" or, as he said "antipodas" as referring to antichthones (people who lived on the opposite side of the Earth), as well as to a geographical place: Apart from these three parts of the world, there exists a fourth part beyond the interior Ocean; it is in the south and is unknown to us because of the burning heat of the Sun; within its borders the fabled Antipodeans are reputed to dwell.

[15] In 748, in reply to a letter from Boniface, Pope Zachary declared the belief "that beneath the earth there was another world and other men, another sun and moon" to be heretical.

Such an argument was forwarded by the Spanish theologian Alonso Tostado as late as the 15th century and "St. Augustine doubts" was a response to Columbus's proposal to sail westwards to the Indies.

Herodotus recorded that Pharaoh Necho II of the 26th Dynasty (610–595 BC) commissioned an expedition of Phoenicians which in three years sailed from the Red Sea around Africa back to the mouth of the Nile, and that "as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya (Africa), they had the sun on their right"— to northward of them, proving that they had been in the Southern Hemisphere.

[22] The earliest surviving account by a European who had visited the Southern Hemisphere is that of Marco Polo (who, on his way home in 1292, sailed south of the Malay Peninsula).

The idea of dry land in the southern climes, the Terra Australis, was introduced by Ptolemy and appears on European maps as an imaginary continent from the 15th century.

[25] Perhaps influenced by this, Fernão Vaz Dourado in his Atlas of 1571 inscribed over the map of Mexico and adjacent parts of America, Tera Antipodum regis Castelle inventa a Xforo Columbo Januensi (Land of the Antipodes, discovered for the King of Castile by Christopher Columbus of Genoa).

[26] In spite of having been discovered relatively late by European explorers, Australia was inhabited very early in human history; the ancestors of the Indigenous Australians reached it at least 50,000 years ago.

The Earth's equatorial bulge makes this slightly longer than a north–south trip around the world along a set of meridian lines, which is a distance of 40,008 kilometres (24,860 mi).

The current world record-holder Airbus A350-900ULR is capable of flying 18,000 kilometres (9,700 nmi; 11,000 mi),[27] or roughly 90% of an average antipodal distance.

[29][30] In March 2021, a Comlux 787-8, registered P4-787, flew a non-scheduled (chartered), non-stop flight from Seoul Incheon to Buenos Aires, which are nearly antipodal points.

This set a new record for the longest commercial non-stop flight with paying passengers, covering 19,483 kilometres (10,520 nmi; 12,106 mi) in 20 hours 19 minutes.

The upcoming Boeing business jet variant, the BBJ 777-8, will also have an antipodal reach with its published range of 21,570 km (13,403 miles).

[32] Both aforementioned variants from Airbus and Boeing are the first aircraft designed to handle flights exceeding the Earth's average antipodal distance of 20,000 km (12,420 miles).

However, with only a length of 3,599 ft (1,097 m), Whangarei's runway is too short to accommodate any current (as of 2015[update]) commercial jet airliner, especially one with the required range.

Automated systems that select the wrong airport from a database could lead to navigation errors or large outliers in data analysis.

[4] The two largest human-inhabited antipodal areas are located in East Asia (mainly eastern China) and South America (mainly Argentina and Chile).

The two largest monolithic antipodal land areas are most of Chile and Argentina along with eastern and central China and Mongolia, and most of Greenland along with a part of Antarctica.

Portions of Suriname, a former Dutch colony, are antipodal to Sulawesi, an Indonesian island spelled Celebes when it was part of the Netherlands East Indies.

Santa Vitória do Palmar, the most southerly town of more than 10,000 people in Brazil, is antipodal to Jeju Island, the southernmost territory of South Korea.

Desolate Kerguelen Island is antipodal to an area of thinly inhabited plains on the border between Cypress County, Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada and the US state of Montana.

The only permanent settlement on Kerguelen Island, the research station Port-aux-Français, is antipodal to fields 10 km (6.2 mi) northeast of Senate, Saskatchewan.

The northern part of Liberty County, Montana, especially the communities Goldstone, Fox Crossing and Sage Creek Colony, also have antipodes on Kerguelen Island.

The remote Pacific atoll of Tematagi is antipodal to the Islamic holy city of Mecca, meaning the direction of Muslim prayer would vary widely from that of surrounding islands.

In a number of cases on extraterrestrial bodies in the Solar System, unusual geologic features (e.g., jumbled terrain or unique volcanic constructs) are located antipodal to major impact basins.