Gone to New York Adventures in the City

ANTIPODES If you drilled a hole straight through the earth, starting at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, you would pass through ten inches of pavement, four feet of pipes, thirty-five feet of Seventh Avenue subway, about twenty-two hundred miles of rock, about thirty-six hundred miles of nickel-iron core, and then another twenty-two hundred miles of rock. You would come out in the Indian Ocean, 1063' east longitude and 4045' south latitude, about three hundred miles off the southwest coast of Australia. You would have reached Manhattan's antipodes, or diametrically opposite point on the globe. You would be about two and a half miles under water. Due north of Manhattan's antipodes, it is 2,040 miles to Malingping, Java. Due south, it is 1,500 miles to the Knox Coast of Antarctica, 2,260 miles to the Russian research station at Vostok, Antarctica, and 2,955 miles to the South Pole. Due west, it is 7,700 miles to Punta Rasa (Flat Point), Argentina. Due east, it is 1,760 miles to Cape Grim, Tasmania. The town nearest to Manhattan's antipodes is Augusta, Australia, 590 miles to the northeast, where Australians go for fishing vacations and where it rains about half the year. Not much goes on in this part of the Indian Ocean. It is fall there now. The water is gray-green, like the North Atlantic, and very rough. Navigators call these latitudes "the roaring forties," because the storms are so violent. There are no shipping lanes near Manhattan's antipodes, so there is no junk on the ocean floor. The ocean floor is completely dark (except for the light produced by occasional luminescent fish and other organisms), and the water at the bottom is only a few degrees above freezing. A white, squishy substance known as globigerina ooze covers the ocean floor. Glob ooze, as oceanographers call it, is a calcium sediment made of the shells of globigerina, which are tiny foraminiferal organisms. Glob ooze can be anywhere from less than an inch to a thousand feet thick. Since it is too much trouble to wash the salt out of it even to make cement, glob ooze has no commercial value. This far from land, there are few fish. A school of whales might pass by seasonally. There might be a few rattails (bottom-feeders related to the shark family) near the ocean floor. If you could walk northeast to Australia, wearing some kind of glob-ooze shoes to keep from sinking in, as well as equipment to deal with the problems of air, light, temperature, and water pressure, you would have to cross underwater mountains of sixty-four hundred feet and descend nineteen thousand feet into valleys before you ascended Australia's continental slope, nearly four hundred miles away. Manhattan's antipodes lies on the southeastern branch of the Mid-Indian Oceanic Ridge, which is a Y-shaped ridge in the middle of the Indian Ocean with heights of ten thousand feet and valleys as deep as fourteen thousand feet. The Mid-Oceanic Ridge is the longest continuous feature on the earth's surface. Dr. Bruce Heezen, of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory (one of the few New Yorkers who have ever been close to Manhattan's antipodes), made the first detailed map of the Indian Ocean floor, under the auspices of the International Indian Ocean Expedition, in the early 1960s. He says that the discovery and exploration of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge provided the conclusive proof for the theory of continental drift. "About fifty million years ago, the ridge moved through Antarctica and chipped off a huge pieceAustraliawhich then headed north and rotated slightly counterclockwise until it crashed into Indonesia," he said. "It did not take long, in geological time. When we discovered that ridge, and when we found that the central and eastern IFrazier, Ian is the author of 'Gone to New York Adventures in the City', published 2005 under ISBN 9780374281632 and ISBN 0374281637.