• Question: Where is the bottom of the world?

    Asked by ailbhewoo to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Jessamyn, Sinead on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Adam Murphy

      Adam Murphy answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Hey ailbhe, There’s a few ways to think about this,

      You could say Antarctica, that’s at the bottom of most maps,

      Or you could look at like a hole, if you fall in a hole you hit the bottom, if you fell through the Earth you’d wind up at the iron ball centre of the Earth, which could be the bottom (but you’d probably have melted by then, it’s about 5500 degress celcius down there)

      There’s another way to think of it, in space, there is no up or down, mathematically, you can have it any way up you like. So there’s no bottom to anything ever.

      Interesting fact, because at the moment we can’t see the edge of the universe, we say it appears to go on forever, so you can say that any point is the centre with forever around it, so technically, You’re the centre of the Universe!

    • Photo: Eleanor Holmes

      Eleanor Holmes answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      If we are constrained to being on the planet I would say the Mariana trench which is the deepest part of the world’s oceans. It’s out in the Pacific ocean below Japan and to the east of the Philippines. It is nearly 11 kilometres deep. For comparison Mt Everest is about 8 kilometres high.

      If we are out in space looking at the planet then top and bottom stop really meaning anything. Where is the bottom of a sphere floating in space? However it would be logical of a passing spacecraft to look at the magnetic field of the Earth which comes out of the Poles North and South. There is no real way to distinguish between North and South in space, but they would likely take one of those to be top and the other to be bottom. So either you would pick the Arctic as the bottom or the Antarctic.

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