Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
In short, we defined our time measurment system that way.
And you have to put the line somewhere. Better between two small islands than in the middle of a continent.
If you leave aside the date change, theyβre only 3 hours apart in terms of time of day.
Itβs very common for places to adopt the time zone of the nearest human settlement. One island goes to the arctic base to the left, one goes to the right.
And they do it because more people go to and from each island than between them. That's mostly the reason for time zone borders anyway
It's why western Spain and eastern Norway share a timezone, despite there being almost 2 hours of actual difference between them.
Time zones have to start and stop somewhere.
Here's a great Map Men video that talks about time zones, and mentions the Diomede Islands and Kiribati as well:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=NBDaLK6EjwI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Nearer the poles you'll have more separation in time zones for the same separation in geographical distance. Closer to the equator you have to travel farther to reach a new time zone.
That's at least my intuitive understanding. Might be wrong...
So these two islands near each other, but also near the pole, will have a lot of separation in different time zones.
We have our time zone "origin" at the prime meridian (Greenwich, UK). As you move one time zone to the east, local time is (generally) an hour later. As you go west, it's an hour earlier. As each time zone spans each direction of the globe, going an ~hour earlier/later along the way, they're eventually going to meet. One direction lost 12 hours, the other gained 12 hours. That's the international date line, where they are 12-(-12)=24 hours apart.
They could have put them in the same time zone (it is a human construct, after all) but since they are associated with two countries, it makes sense to keep each island with its respective country. Since it's right around the opposite side of the prime meridian, it means you're roughly a day apart.
Imagine you're standing ten paces from the south pole. It's 12:00, noon. You then start walking south, and continue in the same direction for twenty paces. You're now on the other side of the world, and it's 00:00, midnight. Twenty paces have a 12 hour time difference.