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Some adds to the Point Nemo discussion...

The Nov 2024 Atlantic had a nice piece on Point Nemo ("The Most Remote Place in the World" by Cullen Murphy).  He does a nice job of covering the history of the "longest swim problem" first proposed at WHOI just up the coast from Frank, and how Hrvoje Lukatela (who started the geodesy company Hipparchus) first identified the exact point in 1992.

Lukatela defined the problem as the point in the center of the largest oceanic circle which contained no land within it, and whose circumference was defined by three points of dry land. (Pandora islet of Ducie island in the Pitcairns, Motu Nui just off the SW coast of Rapa Nui, and Maher Island, near Siple Island off coast of Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica). Lukatela goes into his calcs in detail on his webpage https://www.lukatela.com/pointNemoRevisited/index.html

But the weird angle to Point nemo has another connection to Frank’s New England neighborhood.  H.P. Lovecraft, who lived in Providence, R.I. placed his mythical sunken city of R’lyeh (where the unspeakable horror, Cthulu is imprisoned) in a 1928 story a mere 200 nautical miles (+/-) or so from Lukatela’s calculated Point Nemo.

Then in 1952, Lovecraftian writer August Derlith placed R’lyeh close to the two other points. I've attached a jpg I worked up from Google Earth showing the three points, below.

Now, it of course would be super-easy to determine the general location of the Oceanic point of inaccessibility just by closely studying a detailed globe.

But drilling the calculation down to a more precise point is, as Lukatela’s calculations suggest, a whole other matter entirely.

So how did an obscure writer of weird fiction living an a garret in Providence R.I. calculate his point to within less than a degree of Point Nemo 60+ years before Lukatela? Perhaps he had a friend in th Physics/Astronomy dept at Brown?

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