Have you ever heard of an Earth Sandwich? According to this website (where you can read more detail), an Earth Sandwich is created when two slices of bread are simultaneously placed on opposite sides of the earth. The antipodes of any place on the earth is the place that is diametrically opposite it, so a line drawn from the one to the other passes through the center of the Earth and forms a true diameter. For example, the antipodes of New Zealand's lower North Island lies in Spain.
We first heard about earth sandwiches relating to geocaching when WarNinjas wrote to share about two caches (now archived) that formed an Earth Sandwich:
"My daughter PinkNinja loves to geocache and she loves hiding caches as much or more than finding them. Her idea was to create an Earth Sandwich. One Slice of bread on our side of the earth with an exact slice of bread on the other side. We quickly found out the exact other side was the ocean but figured if you filled up a sandwich with as much filling as the earth it would be more of a sub style sandwich then a flat one.
We found the closest possible spot in Melbourne Australia and then placed ours in San Francisco. TwoDrews hid the other half and we found some life-like bread which we glued to the top of a Lock N' Lock and painted the Lock N' Lock to look like the earth.
We were unsure if both halves would ever be found by one cacher. Well it has happened twice so far. The last one was really cool as a cacher GruffPuppy from Australia came onto our local facebook page asking if there was any must find caches in the area. Turns out he was only 20 miles from the lower crust!"
This was a fun example, but not exactly a true earth sandwich. Unfortunately for the idea of a geocaching earth sandwich, most of the earth's land surfaces have ocean as their antipodes. There's a great tool you can use, called an Antipode Map (or tunnel map) where you can find the antipode for any place on earth. We learned of this tool from rragan who also discovered another geocaching earth sandwich (also now archived) in Spain and New Zealand.
By searching for the words "earth sandwich" on geocaching.com, I found another pair in France and New Zealand which are still active. There are significant limitations for creating a true geocaching earth sandwich, but perhaps there are still some possible locations to create one. There was also a pair of geocaching events, making a sandwich, in Feb 2020 in New Zealand and France.
Do YOU know of a pair of geocaches that create an earth sandwich? Let us know so we can share it with the geocaching community!
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