There's a spot in the Pacific Ocean farther from land than astronauts on the space station.

Point Nemo, formally known as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, sits in the South Pacific at the location farthest from any landmass on Earth — roughly 2,700 kilometers from the nearest coastlines in every direction. When the International Space Station passes overhead on part of its orbit, the astronauts aboard it can be closer to this point than any person standing on land.

Because it’s so remote from shipping lanes and land-based tracking, space agencies use the surrounding waters as a “spacecraft cemetery,” deliberately steering decommissioned satellites and space station modules to burn up and crash there, far from any populated area. The point is named after Captain Nemo, the submarine-faring character from Jules Verne’s novels, a fitting namesake for the most isolated spot on the planet’s surface.