In the middle of the South Pacific, as far from land as you can you possibly get, lies a graveyard.

Not a graveyard for people. Or pets.

Instead, the bodies resting  here belong to hundreds of broken up spacecraft and satellites. When the International Space  Station gets decommissioned, it too will call this place home. But you might be wondering, “Is dumping all our space junk into one  spot in the ocean really a good idea?’ And if so, you wouldn’t be alone.

Some researchers and environmentalists are worried that all this debris might  be taking a toll on the environment. But the alternative could be even worse. [INTRO] The official name for this spacecraft cemetery  is the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area. If you wanted to get there, I don’t know why you did, but if you do, you’d have to sail some 2,700 kilometers  from the nearest spot of land… either the Ducie Island atoll to the north, the islet Motu Nui to the northeast, or Maher Island to the south.

At the middle of this graveyard is Point Nemo, which means ‘no one’ in Latin, because it’s literally the most  isolated place in the world. All you bookworms out there  may have already picked up on the Jules Verne link here. But for those who haven’t, the  name is also a nod to the character in the 1870’s classic Twenty  Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Captain Nemo.

But it’s not just people and land that are notably absent from the area. There might not be very many fish or  other sea creatures there, either. That’s because Point Nemo lies  within the South Pacific Gyre… a kind of ocean desert where the  swirling ocean currents around it pull away most nutrients.

The exact coordinates of Point  Nemo weren’t discovered until 1992, when Croatian-Canadian engineer Hrvoje Lukatela calculated them as a way to test some  mathematical software he’d developed. But that hadn’t stopped space agencies from dumping craft somewhere around there for decades before that. I mean, grab your closest world map placemat.

There is an obvious lack of  major population centers there, even if you can’t pinpoint that exact spot that’s the furthest away from all of them. Some of the first were the  Soviet Salyut space stations, starting with parts of Salyut 1 in 1971. And since the very first “burial”, more than 260 pieces of debris have ended up in this super remote space cemetery.

But not all space objects end up there. Some, particularly satellites, are launched farther out into  space into a graveyard orbit. Those are destined to circle the  Earth in silence for centuries … making them future humanity’s problem.

Meanwhile, other objects are allowed to burn up completely in the atmosphere. That’s what happened to the moon-bound  Peregrine lander in early 2024, after it suffered a fuel leak and  couldn’t fulfill its mission anymore. In fact, even the spacecraft that  do end up in the ocean break apart, and bits of themselves burn up  before their remains hit the water.

It usually goes something like this: Before re-entry, ground crews will  adjust trajectory of the craft so it’ll start breaking up over the ocean. Then, the craft will get a little  kick from its own thrusters. Below an altitude of 600 kilometers or so, atmospheric drag will start  to slow the object down, lowering its orbit, and  increasing gravity’s pull on it.

As it’s hurtling toward its watery grave, an intense pressure wave eventually  forms at the proverbial “bow”, and the air molecules form  a plasma hot enough to melt or even vaporize most of the spacecraft. This typically starts around 110 kilometers, but really gets going at what's  called the nominal breakup altitude: 78 kilometers above the Earth. And finally, the parts that  are sufficiently dense, or were purposefully designed  to be super heat resistant, end up splashing down near Point Nemo.

Just how much of a craft ends up in the water depends on a bunch of factors, including what it’s made out of. For example, around 6 to 19% of the  ISS is expected to survive re-entry, Surprisingly wide range. But this careful maneuvering  doesn’t always go as planned.

In 1991, Salyut 7 accidentally  overshot its target, and wound up disintegrating over Argentina. Now obviously, having hunks of  metal fall near people isn’t great. But some researchers are now saying  that having them plop into the ocean isn’t great, either.

And for a couple of reasons. For one, there’s evidence that  when used rockets and satellites burn up during re-entry, they release metal that hangs  around in the atmosphere. A study from 2023 found that  about 10% of the aerosol particles in the Earth’s stratosphere contain aluminum, lithium, copper, and lead.

Presumably, from the corpses of satellites. Scientists are especially  worried about that aluminum, since it could trigger a  series of chemical reactions that winds up destroying ozone  molecules in our atmosphere. And as you may recall, we’ve already had a hard time  fixing the hole in the ozone layer caused by other stuff we’ve  leaked into the atmosphere.

These metal aerosols could  also change how the atmosphere scatters light, traps and releases  heat, and forms ice molecules. Basically, they’d mess with  how our atmosphere functions. Now, when it comes to the other  dangers of spacecraft dumping, there haven’t been any studies  directly assessing them.

So take what I’m about to  say with a grain of salt. But one worry is that the chunks that splashdown could damage the seafloor,  or whatever’s living there. Remember I said there isn’t  much living around Point Nemo?

Well, our understanding of what  dwells down there is kinda murky. And even though a 1996 NASA report  said that the impact, quote, “would be expected to be small”, end quote, we don’t really have much  evidence to back that up. Metal chunks aside, spacecraft  are also full of other substances that could be much worse.

Many rocket boosters use hydrazine, which  is highly toxic to living organisms, including aquatic life. In people, hydrazine can lead to liver damage, impaired brain functioning and stomach bleeding... all the stuff I don’t want. However bad these risks may be, they all kind of rely on the  pieces of debris staying put.

But that might not be the case. At least one scientist has suggested  that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the Humboldt Current, and the West Wind Drift are all moving some  of our space junk closer to Antarctica. No one has, like, put a tracker on  the debris to see where it’s going.

But early, unpublished studies show it’s becoming more and more  likely to find chemicals, plastic, or metal from space debris in the waters  of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. So the stuff that wasn’t  supposed to be close to anyone or anything might now be edging  closer to wildlife and people. Which might make you wonder  if there’s a better way.

At least for now, letting most  of the spacecraft burn up, and then dumping the rest near Point Nemo, is kind of the only viable option. Just letting the pieces drift around in orbit would add to the more than  9,000 metric tons of space junk floating around up there. All that debris increases the risk that a piece could hit functioning satellites and spacecraft, as well as make it harder  to launch future spacecraft.

For anybody of you who  remember that moment in WALL-E where that adorable boxy  robot hitches a ride to space and the ship bursts through a field of  defunct satellites completely unscathed… reality is not like that. Everything in orbit up there is actually  traveling thousands of kilometers an hour. From WALL-E’s perspective, it is raining car-sized bullets sideways.

To avoid at least one part  of that dystopian future, space agencies and private companies are already trying to stop  putting more junk into space, and are actively trying to clean  up what’s already up there. Meanwhile … at least when it comes to what to  do with big projects like the ISS … NASA plans to bring some parts  back to display in museums. Disassembling a whole space station in  space, and ferrying it down to Earth, would be way too costly, and would mean we’d have to build  a whole new spaceship for the job.

So they still have to worry about  disposing of the bulk of it. The good news is, space agencies  are aware of the space junk problem. But for now, at least, spacecraft and satellites will keep ending up near Point Nemo.

And we can only hope that most of them travel exactly zero leagues under the sea, staying as far away from  everything else as we can manage. [ OUTRO ]