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Sailors reach world's most isolated place

STORY: This is the most isolated place on Earth

Sailors reach it as they take part in the worldwide Ocean Race

Point Nemo is in the south Pacific Ocean, 1,670 miles from land in every direction

The nearest humans are astronauts in space

[Charlie Enright, Skipper, 11th Hour Racing Team]

“So, there’s no other place on the planet where you can get farther from land than Point Nemo, and I think that really puts what we’re doing in perspective. Crazy. There’s no one else down here, and that is very apparent when you look at the chart and you talk about Point Nemo and what it represents. I mean, the big line, if you will, about Point Nemo is that when we’re down here, the closest people to us other than our competitors will be the people in the Space Station.”

The race continues after setting off from Spain in January

The yachts are expected to reach Italy by July

The teams are collecting scientific data as they travel around the world

[Simon Fisher, Navigator, 11th Hour Racing Team]

“So yeah, we carry this ocean pack here on-board 11th Hour Racing, and as I was saying before, it runs 24/7, just taking water samples constantly as we sail around the globe. It’s recording some important, interesting data, things like solidity of the sea surface, dissolves CO2, and then obviously, the sea surface temperature as we go around, and then that, all that information could be fed back into a much broader dataset, which gives us really important information on the ocean, climatology and this data can be also used in things like weather modelling and what have you.”