That’s basically because Newfoundland was a separate colony when time zones became a thing, so it had the right to establish its own time zone.
The bulk of the country makes things simple enough, running from GMT-4 in the east, through GMT-5 in Toronto and Québec, GMT-6 in Winnipeg, GMT-7 in Edmonton to GMT-8 in Vancouver in the west. Staying in a similar geographic locale, the Newfoundlanders decided to screw up the orderliness of Canada’s time zones. Meanwhile, Greenland’s 18th-largest city of Ittoqqortoormiit runs on GMT-1 along with pretty much nobody except the Azores and Cape Verde. The Thule Air Base, run by the United States Air Force in the northwest of Greenland, runs on GMT-4, while the Danmarkshavn weather station (permanent population: eight) runs on GMT – for no particularly good reason. Almost all of Greenland runs on GMT-3, putting it four hours behind its parent nation, Denmark but a few tiny corners insist on having things their own way. If anything, in fact, goes rather too far the other way.
Greenland is another fairly big place, but it has not made the same mistakes as China. Pleasingly, though, the country’s uniform time zone means that if you can negotiate the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas, you can cross over into Afghanistan and set your clock back three and a half hours – the biggest land border time-zone change on the planet.
#World time zones update
That, unsurprisingly, is incredibly complicated – as Apple learnt when an iOS update silently put all users onto the local unofficial time zone, meaning many people’s alarms went off two hours later than they were expecting. One half of the city in Western China uses its own unofficial time zone, while the other runs a working day from 11pm-7pm to account for out of kilter day inflicted by Beijing.
In fact, it’s so illogical that Urumqi’s time zone is unofficially split in two. When the sun rises on the longest day in the far eastern city of Jiamusi, it’s 7:24pm in the UK, but when it rises in the far west, in Kashgar, it’s 11:29pm.Īnd yet the entire country only has one time zone. The third-largest country in the world, China sprawls across the Asian continent, spanning a sixth of the world’s breadth. And even though it’s probably better than the alternative system, where once upon a time every town set its clock to noon when the sun was at its highest and integration be damned, the standardisation of time zones has resulted in some very strange side-effects.
0 kommentar(er)
