It’s a childhood riddle: Where would you end up if you dug a hole to the other side of the world? (Of course, that’s assuming one could survive tunneling through the molten innards of the Earth.) Kids in the United States are usually led to imagine that they’d pop up like groundhogs in a rice field in China. Wrong. One look at a map of antipodes—places on exact opposite sides of the globe—shows that an American digger would end up in the Indian Ocean. As for sandbox fantasists in China, some would luck out and emerge on land in Chile.
