Ends of
the Earth

Longyearbyen sits at 78° north, roughly 1,300 km from the North Pole and closer to it than to Oslo. About 2,500 people live here, which makes it the northernmost real town on Earth; the handful of places further north, Ny-Ålesund and Canada's Alert, are research and military stations where people are posted, not where they live.

Four months of night, then four months of day: the year has two halves, not four seasons.

The sun sets in late October and does not rise again until the middle of February. In those months the town runs on street lights and headlamps, and the only glow on the horizon is the aurora. From April to August it never sets at all.

The rules are the strangest part. Outside the town limits you must carry a rifle, because polar bears outnumber people on the archipelago. Expectant mothers fly to the mainland weeks before they are due, since the small hospital is not set up for births. And since the 1950s nobody has been buried here: the permafrost preserves bodies instead of letting them go.

For decades Ushuaia in Argentina sold itself as the end of the world, and most of the world's cruise ships still leave from there. But across the Beagle Channel, on Navarino Island, is Puerto Williams: a couple of thousand people once the navy is counted, a naval base, a yacht club built inside a beached ship, and the title of southernmost city since Chile promoted it from a village in 2019.

The end of the world has a rival, and it won.

The island was home to the Yaghan, who paddled these freezing channels in bark canoes, kept fires burning in the boats and wore almost nothing. Cristina Calderón, the last native speaker of their language, died here in 2022 at ninety-three.

An hour down the coast is Puerto Toro, a hamlet of about 36 people that is the southernmost permanently inhabited place of all. Beyond the town is the Dientes de Navarino, a circuit of jagged peaks that is the southernmost trek on Earth, and beyond that only Cape Horn and the Drake Passage before Antarctica.

Tristan da Cunha is a volcano in the South Atlantic with a village on its one flat ledge. Edinburgh of the Seven Seas has about 230 residents, seven surnames between them, a pub, a church, and no airport. The nearest neighbours are on St Helena, 2,400 km away; Cape Town is 2,800 km.

An island where a trip to the neighbours is further than London to Moscow.

The only way in is by ship from Cape Town, five to ten days depending on the sea, on a fishing vessel or a polar research ship that calls a handful of times a year. You must ask the Island Council for permission before you book, and if the weather closes the landing you may wait weeks to leave.

In 1961 the volcano erupted behind the village and all 264 islanders were evacuated to England. They spent two winters in Hampshire, voted to go home, and in 1963 almost all of them did.

At 5,100 metres, La Rinconada is higher than Everest Base Camp. The air holds half the oxygen of sea level, nothing grows, the water freezes at night in every month of the year, and about 30,000 people live here anyway. The reason is under the glacier: gold.

Higher than any base camp, with no mountain to climb: just a mine, a glacier and the thin air.

Most of the miners work under a system called cachorreo. For thirty days they are not paid at all. On the thirty-first they may keep whatever ore they can carry out on their backs, and the day's luck decides the month.

Scientists come here to study what permanent life at this altitude does to the body: the thick blood, the enlarged hearts, the chronic mountain sickness. It is not a place that welcomes tourists, and this story does not recommend it as one.

Every other place on land is above the Dead Sea shore. The water sits about 440 metres below sea level and nothing lives in it; the salt is ten times the ocean's, which is why you float like a cork and why a cut stings for an hour.

The shoreline the hotels were built on is now a walk away, and still moving.

The sea is also disappearing. The Jordan River that fed it is diverted for farms and cities, and the level falls by roughly a metre a year. Hotels built on the beach in the 1980s now run shuttle buses to reach the water, and more than 6,000 sinkholes have opened along the receding shore.

Jericho, a few kilometres up the valley, may be the oldest continuously inhabited town on Earth, and the caves above Qumran are where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947.

Oymyakon is a village of about 500 people in a valley in Yakutia, and in 1933 its thermometer read −67.7 °C, the lowest temperature ever recorded at a place where people live all year, a record it shares with Verkhoyansk, 600 km away, which claims −67.8 °C from 1892. January averages around −50 °C. Breath freezes in the air with a soft crackle the locals call the whisper of the stars.

Only below minus fifty-two does school close.

The school closes only when it drops below −52 °C. Cars are left running all winter, or kept in heated garages, because an engine that stops will not start again. Pens freeze, glasses stick to faces, and the dead are buried only after the ground has been thawed with bonfires for two or three days.

The valley is cold because it is a bowl: heavy air sinks into it and stays. It is also 750 km from the nearest city on a road built by prisoners of the Gulag, whose bones are said to lie beneath it.

On 10 July 1913 the thermometer at Furnace Creek read 56.7 °C, and no reliable station on Earth has beaten it since. The valley is a trench between two mountain ranges, 86 metres below sea level at Badwater, where hot air pools and the rocks keep radiating heat all night.

A century on, nowhere has recorded a hotter day.

Summer nights here often stay above 38 °C. In 1972 the ground temperature reached 93.9 °C, hot enough to cook on. Yet the park has a golf course, a hotel with a spring-fed pool, and in a wet spring the valley floor turns into a carpet of wildflowers.

The 1913 reading has its sceptics, who think the observer made an error; even they accept the 54.4 °C measured here in 2020 and again in 2021, which would still make Death Valley the hottest place that has ever been measured.

Mawsynram gets about 11.9 metres of rain in an average year, most of it between June and September. London gets 0.6. The village sits on the southern edge of the Khasi hills, where monsoon clouds rolling up from the Bay of Bengal hit a wall and empty themselves.

Twelve metres of rain a year, and bridges that are grown rather than built.

People here work outdoors under knups, shields of bamboo and banana leaf worn like a turtle shell. Houses are lined with grass to deaden the drumming on the roof. And across the valleys the Khasi grow bridges: they train the roots of rubber fig trees across rivers over decades, and the living bridges hold where steel ones rust.

Nearby Cherrapunji held the title for most of the twentieth century and still holds the record for a single year: about 26,470 mm between August 1860 and July 1861. Two villages in Colombia have posted higher averages over shorter periods, so the Guinness title is Mawsynram's, with an asterisk.

Arica, on the Atacama coast, averages less than a millimetre of rain a year and once went fourteen years without any, from 1903 to 1918. Quillagua, inland, averages half a millimetre; in the 'absolute desert' near Yungay, some stations have recorded none at all. The mountains block the wet air from the Amazon and the cold Humboldt Current stops it forming over the sea.

Rovers are tested here because it is the closest thing to Mars with an airport.

The ground is so dry and so like Mars that NASA tests its rovers here, and the sky is so clear that the world's biggest telescopes, including ALMA at 5,000 metres, have been built on its plateaus. On the rare years it does rain, the desert blooms in purple and pink for a few weeks.

People have lived here all along: the Chinchorro of the coast made the oldest known mummies, two thousand years before Egypt, and the dry air has kept them.

Point Nemo is the spot in the ocean farthest from any coast. The nearest land is 2,688 km away in three directions: Ducie Island in the Pitcairns, Motu Nui off Easter Island, and Maher Island on the edge of Antarctica. It was located in 1992 by a Croatian engineer, Hrvoje Lukatela, with a computer rather than a ship.

The nearest humans are often 400 km straight up.

When the International Space Station passes overhead at 400 km, the astronauts are closer to Point Nemo than anyone on Earth. Fittingly, this is where space agencies aim their falling spacecraft: more than 260 have been steered into the water here, including the Mir station, and the ISS itself is due to join them around 2031.

Nothing much lives here either. The water is in the middle of a slowly turning gyre, poor in nutrients, and sailors in round-the-world races describe it as the loneliest stretch of their lives.

The Earth is not a perfect ball; it bulges at the equator by about 21 km. So the summit of Chimborazo, a 6,263-metre volcano almost exactly on the equator, is about 2 km farther from the planet's centre than the top of Everest, and the closest point on land to space.

Stand on top and you are closer to the stars than anyone on Everest.

In 1802 Alexander von Humboldt tried to climb it and turned back at around 5,900 metres, bleeding from the gums; it was still the highest any European had recorded going. For a while people believed it was the tallest mountain in the world.

Today a road reaches the refuge at 4,850 metres, and from there the summit is a night climb of eight or nine hours on snow with a guide. On the way up you pass vicuñas, the wild cousins of the llama, reintroduced here in the 1980s.

The bottom of the Challenger Deep is about 10,935 metres down, so far that if Everest were dropped into it the summit would still be two kilometres under water. The pressure is over a thousand atmospheres, the temperature just above freezing, and the light has been gone for ten kilometres.

Drop Everest in and the summit would still be two kilometres under.

Two men went down in 1960 and one, the film-maker James Cameron, in 2012. Then in 2019 the submersible Limiting Factor started making repeat dives, and the number of people who have been to the bottom passed the number who have walked on the Moon. Seats on private expeditions sold for around $750,000 before the submersible changed hands in 2022; about thirty people have been down.

Life is there anyway: pale sea cucumbers, shrimp-like amphipods the size of a hand, and, in the sediment, a plastic bag.

Kiritimati, pronounced 'Christmas', is the largest coral atoll in the world by land, and it lives 14 hours ahead of Greenwich: the earliest clock on Earth. Every day begins here, and every New Year's Eve the fireworks here are the first on the planet.

Midnight comes here before anywhere else, because a country redrew the line.

It was not always so. The island lies east of the 180th meridian, which should put it a day behind its own capital in Tarawa. In 1995 Kiribati simply moved the International Date Line around its eastern islands, so the whole country could share a working week; a bend on the map that was drawn with a pen.

The lagoon is one of the great bonefishing flats of the Pacific, the atoll is a bird sanctuary, and in the late 1950s and early 60s Britain and the United States tested hydrogen bombs in the sky above it.

Ürümqi has four million people and is about 2,500 km from the nearest coastline, further from the sea than any other large city on Earth. The Eurasian pole of inaccessibility, the point on the continent farthest from any ocean, lies in the Gurbantünggüt desert about 320 km to the north, though geographers argue over the exact spot.

Stand in the Grand Bazaar and the nearest beach is a Paris-to-Moscow away.

Thirty kilometres from the city a monument marks what a 1992 survey decided was the geographical centre of Asia. The city itself is a Silk Road crossroads that became a railway and oil town, with Uyghur bazaars, Han high-rises and the Tian Shan mountains standing over it with snow for most of the year.

Being this far inland gives it a climate of extremes: winters near −20 °C, summers above 35 °C, and air so dry that the snow squeaks underfoot. The clocks are odd too: officially the city runs on Beijing time, but many locals keep an unofficial Xinjiang time two hours behind, so a shop that opens at 'ten' may open at eight.

Where the equator crosses the prime meridian there is nothing but ocean, about 570 km south of Ghana, and for years a yellow weather buoy that scientists called Soul. Mapmakers call the spot Null Island, and it is one of the most visited places in the world's data.

Millions of records say they were made here. None of them were.

The reason is a bug. When software fails to find an address it often returns latitude zero, longitude zero, and so for years photos, fitness runs, crimes and deliveries have been quietly filed to this patch of water. One analysis found Null Island was the 'location' of millions of records; a city that exists only in spreadsheets.

The buoy was real, part of the PIRATA array that measures the Atlantic for weather forecasts, and until 2021 it bobbed there taking the temperature of a place where everybody's lost data goes to live. Mapmakers have since added a one-square-metre 'Null Island' to their test data, so that errors landing there are easy to spot.