As young geo-nerds, my brother and I started digging a hole in our back yard in Pennsylvania. Eventually we hoped to reach China because that was the cliche of the time. This ignores the fact that you probably wouldn't dig precisely downwards without a level and if you did, you'd melt when you got to the earth's core. We also didn't realize that a straight dig downwards would have put us off the coast of western Australia. This is our antipode - the opposite side of the earth.
Most places don't have very interesting antipodes - North America is opposite the Indian Ocean and most of Europe and Africa is opposite the Pacific. Spain, however shares an antipode with New Zealand. The Antipodes Spain/New Zealand School Map is a tool teachers can use to teach geography and hopefully set up relationships between schools on opposite sides of the globe.
Zoom in on a location and you can see the closest opposite school.
In a large city such as Madrid, the idea breaks down a bit as you have numerous schools competing to partner with New Zealand's Weber School, located in a low density area with few nearby schools.
The area around Wellington, New Zealand, being opposite the triangle between Madrid, Salamanca and Valladolid, has much better opportunities for anitpode sister schools though most of the city is paired with the Miguel De Cervantes School.
- via Maps Mania
Most places don't have very interesting antipodes - North America is opposite the Indian Ocean and most of Europe and Africa is opposite the Pacific. Spain, however shares an antipode with New Zealand. The Antipodes Spain/New Zealand School Map is a tool teachers can use to teach geography and hopefully set up relationships between schools on opposite sides of the globe.
2 comments:
Spain seems to have a ton of schools. Closest antipode school to Boston, and really for much of the U.S., seems to be Walpole, Australia.
In most of the Chilean territory, if we dig the symbolic tunnel, we do reach China (and its neighbour, Mongolia). However, many of the antipodean lands that oppose the major Chilean cities and towns are virtually uninhabited, so any project involving sister schools will find an utter silence on the other end.
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