Looking into a well from China to Chile
January 7th, 2010
I was reading about the weird and intriguing (and for purposes of this blog, not so relevant) theory of geological hot spots in Al Gore’s great climate change primer Our Choice, and it got me thinking. The (still unproven) idea is that areas of the earth’s surface that are unusually hot, such as Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park in the US, can be explained by large asteroid strikes in the ocean at the corresponding place exactly on the opposite side of the world. This point, 180 degrees away, is called an antipode.
This made me remember growing up in the US and occasionally hearing grownups say “if you dig a hole straight through the earth to the other side, you’d be in China.” This, I can confirm with this nifty Antipode Map, is not the case. America’s whole collective anitpode is out in the south Indian Ocean (exception: Hawaii – you’re in Botswana!)
But it turns out that China and Latin America have some serious antipodean matching going on. John at the great Sinosplice blog apparently figured this out three years ago:
So you can see that China mostly just overlaps with Argentina, and most countries don’t overlap with any land at all. According to another website, China gets these exciting antipodes match-ups:
- Beijing – Bahia Blanca, Argentina
- Taipei – Asuncion, Paraguay
- Shanghai – Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Wuhan – Cordoba, Argentina
- Xi’an – Santiago, Chile
Some of them are give-or-take a few hundred kilometers according to the map but still cool approximations to know.
Back in October, I posted a snippet of a Shanghai Daily article relating to Chile’s pavilion preparation for this year’s Shanghai Expo:
At the Shanghai event next year, Chile will attract visitors with three special wells. People will be able to look into the wells in the pavilion in Shanghai to see scenes and hear the sounds of some Chilean cities on the opposite side of the earth.
It still sounds hokey, but I guess now more credible than the “digging a hole to China” silliness I thought of when I first heard about it – even if those scenes and sounds are technically coming from Argentina.
Image: Sinosplice