Tonight I met up with Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, who in 2007 co-authored a paper entitled “Poles of Inaccessibility: A Calculation Algorithm for the Remotest Places on Earth”. I stumbled upon the article when I lived in Kyrgyzstan and made the astute observation that I was really really far away from water. I got in touch with Daniel and over the course of many months he provided invaluable feedback on topics as far ranging as oceanic penetration into Siberia, tidal levels in those pesky Sundarbans, and measuring the radius of an ellipsoid called Earth.

In May 2013, I led an “expedition” of 6 friends to one of the two sites proposed by Garcia-Castellanos in his paper. To make a long story short, we didn’t quite make it. At our closest, we were about 67km to the east. I was disappointed afterwards — I felt like I had failed and that the trip was all for naught. Defeated, I hung my head and travelled back to Kyrgyzstan, moving back to the US shortly after.

More than a year later, I was prompted to return to the photos and calculations this week when Daniel emailed me asking how our trip had gone. What I realized in going back through our work was that, despite not making it, we had been on an incredible adventure. Furthermore, my trip was not a failure because I didn’t reach the destination, but was a failure because I had done nothing to document our progress so that future explorers could build upon our work.

In an attempt to rectify this, I built this Google Map to help others who may want to try to reach the point on Earth furthest from the ocean. The map includes an itinerary of our trip, notes for future explorers, the locations of the two EPIAs put forth by Daniel, and a number of other sites that claim to be the EPIA or something similar (Centre of Eurasia, Heartland of Asia, etc.). I did my best to document all our research here so as to raise the bar of common knowledge on the subject and, in doing so, found myself more able to look back on our trip as a success.