It’s a special offset time zone and a bonus time zone around the International Date Line.īy the way, daylight saving time is obviously very absurd. Yes, 38 is the number of time zones in the world, even though that adds up to 39.īecause of the weird UTC +13:45, which is only for New Zealand’s Chatham Islands (population: 800) and only during daylight saving time, which is counted in both the 2nd and 3rd types. 4 bonus time zones (around the International Date Line).
What explains the number of time zones in the world So let’s look at those slight complications.
#Time zone map usa interactive how to
Those modifications have created quite a few quirks on the time zone map, which I’ll cover in a separate post soon (like the neighboring islands with a 26-hour time difference and how to jump forward 3.5 hours in 1 step, in theory).īut that just explains the weird time zone borders, not the reason there are 38 time zones instead of 24. Other countries are huge and should have multiple time zones, but their government wants everyone to have the same time (like in China, for example). Imagine if major cities had a time zone line right in the middle! That would make no sense. See full-size infographicįirst, time zones don’t just follow the longitudinal lines: they were adapted to follow regional and national borders for convenience. This color-coded map shows them well, but we’ll get back to it in a second. There are in fact 38 time zones in the world, over 50% more than it could be if things were kept simple.
Each time zone would measure 15 degrees (360 degrees divided by 24 hours) and would represent a 1-hour difference in solar time.īut it’s not that simple. So, in theory, that would make a nice even 24 time zones if each time zone were just 1 hour apart and were set according to distances only. That rotation process takes 24 hours, so that’s the length of a day. It rotates on its axis, so that gives us night and day periods. The Earth is a sphere, so that’s 360 degrees in longitude.
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