Featured Image Credit: Matt Forrest / YouTube
One YouTuber managed to discover the unsolved mystery behind the world's loneliest building, revealing not only how far away it is from the next nearest structure, but the exact reason why it's so isolated in the first place.
Found roughly 457 miles away from the next nearest building, a simple castaway depot on Antipodes Island is officially – or at least for the time being – the world's most isolated or 'loneliest' structure.
This was discovered using new open source data analysis tools from Overture Maps and WherobotsDB's cloud spatial database, powered also by information provided by Google's street view maps and satellite information — although there's a good chance there's still something even more remote.
The brains behind the discovery is mapping enthusiast Matt Forrest on YouTube, who has spent over 15 years making and analyzing maps, but this might just be his most ambitious project yet.
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Using the tools at his disposal, he tried to find the loneliest building at four different scales: New York City, the state of Texas, the entirety of the United States, and every inch of Planet Earth.
Understandably this was much easier to do in the smaller areas, but he already discovered a number of flaws with the process along the way.
Not only were calculations incredibly difficult and time consuming to complete when looking at one singular large data set, but not every building is unfortunately recognized by the tools right now, as it requires the satellite imagery to be captured in a high enough definition.
In just Texas alone, however, there were more than 2.5 billion buildings on record — so you can imagine quite how impressive this task is when looking across the entire world for the most remote structure.
That was found on one of the Antipodes Islands several hundred miles off the coast of New Zealand though, as a castaway depot designed to provide emergency relief for victims of shipwrecks is now officially the loneliest place on Earth.
It is exactly 457.9 miles (736.92 kilometers) away from the nearest building in New Zealand, which is just off the coast of Dunedin, and something even more remarkable is the fact that it is viewable in high definition via Street View.
Mysteriously enough, there are two people standing next to it on Google Street View, and nobody knows why...
This means that someone purposefully went there to capture the hut and it's surrounding 'streets', with images showing a group of people presumably staying at that time within the building itself.
Castaway huts and depots like this are usually checked every few months just in case someone does end up there for its intended purpose, so even the most remote location on Earth won't leave you too isolated in the worst case scenario.
Forrest does clarify that a lack of complete information for every part of our planet does suggest that there's likely somewhere even more lonely yet to be discovered, but for now the title remains in the hand of this Antipodean hut.
