International Timezone Converter

The course of the sun around the economy

Time zones were created around the course of the sun around the earth. While it is 12 noon in the US, it is already early morning in Europe and still night in Australia. Towards the end of the 19th century, every large place had its own time, which was actually based on the position of the sun. From a purely geographical point of view, a systematic subdivision of the earth divides it into 24 equal-sized pieces. Each of these sections has a west-east extension of 15 longitudes (= meridians) in the optimum case, thus a 24th of the globe, where a time zone would always be exactly one hour distance from the next.

This is only the case in theory. In reality, country borders, rather than longitudes, form the time zones, which not always separated by hourly intervals. For example, Iran and Afghanistan are 8.5 hours ahead of New York. Around Australia and New Zealand, there are several time zones that move at half-hour or even quarter-hour intervals.

It is just as chaotic at the national borders, as trade and politics play a much larger role than the course of the sun. Within the US, there are four time zones on the mainland alone. From a geographical point of view, there are 64 degrees of longitude and thus actually four time zones, each of which would be approximately 15 degrees wide. In Europe, from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the east of Poland, the same time applies, which is not justifiable geographically. There are 33 countries that have united to avoid problems in politics and trade that would have arisen from different time zones.

For the same reason, numerous countries decide to belong to one time zone or another. Things get particularly confusing in the Pacific near the International Date Line. Alaska should actually be in a time zone from UTC-10 to UTC-11. But in order not to be too far off from the rest of the United States, the UTC-9 time zone was chosen. The dwarf state Cook Islands chose UTC-10, the same time zone as the islands of French Polynesia to the west of it. Kiribati, which is also located more to the west, is a whole day further ahead in the UTC+14 zone.

This distribution of the times from UTC-11 to UTC+14 already makes us sit up and take notice. In purely mathematical terms, a division into 24 hours should work at most from -11 to +12. Instead, time zones are created in which neighboring countries are up to 26 hours apart.