Where Would You End Up if You Dug Straight Down From Utica?

When we were little kids growing up, we always joked about digging a hole to China. The assumption was, if you went out into your back yard and started digging, and kept digging and digging, you'd end up...SOMEWHERE...on the other side of the world.

Of course none of this could ever happen. But there's a fun website called AntipodesMap.com that shows you what WOULD occur if you DID dig straight down and kept going until you popped out the other end. All you need to do is enter your town or zip code and the website will take it from there. In our case here in Central New York, the results are pretty cool. Using Utica as an example, here's the "Before" shot:

Now, apply the principle of antipodes, a word meaning the exact opposite of something. In geographical terms, take the spots on the Earth's surface that are diametrically opposite to each other...and...in the "After" shot, you'd be floating somewhere between Australia and Africa:

A pair of points antipodal to each other means that a straight line connecting the two would pass through the Earth's center. So, Utica would go straight down into the Indian Ocean.

By the way, we played around with the AntipodesMap.com site and found that the antipodal points of MOST land masses on Earth end up in an ocean. In order to dig down and actually wind up in CHINA (Hong Kong, to be exact), you'd have to begin digging near the border of Bolivia and Chile in South America...or vice versa as these maps show: