Antipode Calculator - Latitude, Longitude, and the Opposite Point

An antipode calculator finds the point on Earth that is diametrically opposite to any latitude and longitude you enter. It flips the sign of the latitude, adds 180 degrees to the longitude, and wraps the result back into the standard -180 to +180 range so you can read the answer as a normal signed coordinate pair.

• • Geography trivia and classroom exercises: Answer 'what is on the other side of the world?' questions for any city, mountain, or country without flipping a globe or doing the coordinate math by hand.
• • Curiosity travel planning: Find where to look on a map if you ever dug straight through the Earth from your current location, which is the playful 'Earth sandwich' framing from the 2020 New Zealand-Spain stunt.
• • Coordinate sanity checks: Confirm a latitude and longitude you typed into a map by checking that the antipode is what you expect, which helps catch off-by-sign mistakes on the antimeridian.
• • Map and GIS helpers: Provide a quick, script-free way to test latitude/longitude tools that consume signed coordinates and need a known opposite point.

The word 'antipode' comes from the Greek 'anti' (opposite) and 'pous' (foot). For most of recorded history people imagined the antipodes as either another landmass ('Terra Australis') or, more fancifully, a race of people standing upside down. Today the word simply means the point on a sphere that is exactly opposite another point along a line that passes through the center of the sphere.

This page treats Earth as a sphere with a single radius and uses signed decimal-degree coordinates. If you have a coordinate in degrees, minutes, and seconds, the link below rewrites it into the same signed format the calculator expects.

If you have a coordinate in degrees, minutes, and seconds, Coordinates Converter can rewrite it as signed decimal degrees before you paste it into this page.

The page implements the standard antipode formula in two short steps: flip the latitude, then rotate the longitude by 180 degrees. It also computes the great-circle distance to the antipode, which is a constant π × R kilometers for every antipode pair on a sphere.

• lat, lon: Signed decimal-degree coordinates of the input point. Latitude is positive north of the equator and negative south; longitude is positive east of the prime meridian and negative west.
• lat_a, lon_a: Signed decimal-degree coordinates of the antipode. Both are written in the same hemisphere convention as the input so the answer can be pasted into any map tool.
• 180° longitude shift: The opposite meridian is 180 degrees of longitude away. If the input is positive you subtract 180 and if it is negative you add 180, which keeps the answer in the standard -180 to +180 range and avoids crossing the antimeridian by accident.

The calculator validates the latitude against -90 to +90 and the longitude against -180 to +180. If either value is out of range, it stops and shows a clear error rather than producing a misleading answer.

The great-circle distance from any point to its antipode is exactly half the circumference of the great circle that passes through both points. On a sphere with radius 6,371.0088 km, that distance is π × 6,371.0088, or about 20,015 km.

According to Wolfram MathWorld, the antipode of a point on a sphere is the point obtained by drawing a line through the original point and the center of the sphere, which on Earth puts the antipodal latitude at the negation of the input latitude and the antipodal longitude 180 degrees away from the input longitude.

When the next step in your workflow is to drop the antipode into a GIS tool, Lat Long to UTM Calculator converts signed lat/long into UTM zone, easting, and northing in meters.

Four ideas explain what the calculator is doing and why the answer is what it is.

The same line through the center of the Earth that defines an antipode is a great circle, and Great Circle Calculator computes the distance along any great circle between two coordinates.

Five short steps take you from a pair of coordinates to the antipode, a hemisphere label, and the great-circle distance.

1. 1 Look up a latitude and longitude: Right-click any location in Google Maps or another map app to copy its latitude and longitude, or copy a coordinate from a list, dataset, or your own log. The default values are the summit of Mount Everest.
2. 2 Enter the latitude: Type the latitude in signed decimal degrees. Use a positive number for the Northern Hemisphere and a negative number for the Southern Hemisphere.
3. 3 Enter the longitude: Type the longitude in signed decimal degrees. Use a positive number for the Eastern Hemisphere and a negative number for the Western Hemisphere.
4. 4 Read the antipode coordinates: The two antipode outputs are shown to four decimal places with hemisphere labels. Paste them into Google Maps or another map tool to drop a pin on the opposite side of the planet.
5. 5 Check the great-circle distance: The distance is always about 20,015 km on a sphere, but reading it confirms that the antipode was computed on the same sphere model. If you want to convert it to miles, use a distance converter on the result.

Try entering the coordinates of Auckland, New Zealand: -36.8485, 174.7633. The calculator returns about 36.85°, -5.24°, with the antipode falling just off the southern coast of Spain near Cádiz, which is the rough location of the 2020 'Earth sandwich'.

The great-circle distance is shown in kilometers, and Distance Converter lets you switch the result to miles, nautical miles, or meters without re-entering any coordinates.

These benefits show up most often when you need a quick, trustworthy answer for a single coordinate pair.

• • Skip the manual sign math: Flipping the latitude and adding 180 to the longitude is easy to get wrong, especially near the antimeridian. The calculator handles the wrap and keeps the answer in the standard signed range.
• • Read hemisphere labels at a glance: The page converts raw signs into 'Northern / Southern' and 'Eastern / Western' labels so you can spot a mistake in the input without re-reading the raw numbers.
• • Get the distance for free: The distance from any point to its antipode is a constant on a sphere, but seeing it next to the coordinates confirms the calculation and lets you convert to miles with the same calculator workflow.
• • Handle the pole and antimeridian edge cases: The validator flags out-of-range latitudes and longitudes, and the longitude wrap lands correctly at +179.99 / -179.99 boundaries rather than jumping past them.
• • Plug into coordinate workflows: Inputs and outputs are signed decimal degrees, the same convention Google Maps and most GIS tools use, so the answer can be pasted directly into the next tool in your pipeline.

If you need to share the antipode with a reader who prefers degrees-minutes-seconds over decimal degrees, Degrees Minutes Seconds Calculator reformats the result in either direction.

The formula is fixed, but a few inputs change how the result should be read and which map tools will accept it.

• • The calculator treats Earth as a sphere with a single radius, so the great-circle distance is an approximation within about 0.3% of the WGS84 ellipsoid value.
• • It does not draw the antipode on a map. You still need a map tool, such as Google Maps, to confirm where the antipode visually lands.
• • It does not classify whether the antipode is on land or in the ocean, so for that check use the result as input to a geographic lookup rather than reading it from the calculator itself.

According to NASA Planetary Fact Sheet, Earth's mean radius is 6,371.0088 km, which sets the half-circumference distance from any point to its antipode at about 20,015 km along the equator.

According to the National Geographic Society, the antimeridian is the meridian at 180 degrees longitude, halfway around the world from the prime meridian, which is why the antipode longitude is always lon plus or minus 180 degrees from the input longitude.