Original photo by © Don Despain/Alamy
Most people logically assume the maximum time difference between any two places on Earth would be 24 hours. After all, that’s how long it takes our planet to spin once, so it seems sensible that no two points on Earth could be more than one full rotation apart. Systems crafted by humans, however, are often anything but sensible — and the actual maximum time difference on Earth is 26 hours. So where do those extra two hours come from?
The conventional time zone system runs from UTC-12 in the west to UTC+12 in the east (UTC meaning “Coordinated Universal Time”), which would produce a maximum gap of 24 hours. Within that system there are 38 offsets, which is the amount of time a specific region’s local clock is ahead of or behind UTC. UTC-12, for example, refers to a time zone that’s 12 hours behind UTC, while UTC+12 would be 12 hours ahead.
Those offsets normally remain within the 24-hour frame, but there are places on Earth that have gone against that convention, winding up in UTC+13 and UTC+14. Three places are responsible for this strange occurrence: Howland Island, Baker Island, and the Line Islands of Kiribati.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factDue to tidal friction caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, Earth’s rotation has been gradually slowing down throughout most of the planet’s history. Because of this, the length of a day has increased by about 1.8 milliseconds per century on average.
Howland Island and Baker Island are uninhabited coral atolls (and unincorporated U.S. territories) sitting at UTC-12, at what is considered the extreme west of our planet. Kiribati, meanwhile, sits in the extreme east — and is home to the strange time zone of UTC+14.
Despite being more than an entire day apart on the calendar, those islands are only a few hundred miles away from each other in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to the spherical nature of the planet and the way we draw our lines of longitude. So, while it’s 10:30 p.m. on a Wednesday on Howland Island and Baker Island, it can be 12:30 a.m. on a Friday in the Line Islands.
While this may seem very odd, there’s a logical reason why Kiribati ended up at UTC+14. The islands were once located right on the International Date Line, meaning a full 24-hour gap existed within the same territory, so while it was Monday in the western islands, it was Sunday in the east.
To eliminate that confusion, Kiribati made the decision to essentially move the International Date Line at the very end of 1994, placing all its territories on the same date. The result was UTC+14, a time zone that shouldn't technically exist, and a 26-hour gap between Kiribati and its Pacific neighbors.
Numbers Don't Lie
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The largest country with only one time zone is ______.
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The largest country with only one time zone is China.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
Venus is arguably the strangest planet in our solar system when it comes to time. A year — the time it takes to orbit the sun once — is 225 Earth days on Venus, which sounds fairly normal until you learn that a single day on the planet (one full rotation on its axis) takes 243 Earth days. Therefore, a day on Venus is technically longer than its year.
To make things even more bizarre, Venus rotates backward compared to most planets, including Earth, in what is known as a retrograde rotation. Earth spins counterclockwise, but Venus spins clockwise, so on Venus, the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
Tony is an English writer of nonfiction and fiction living on the edge of the Amazon jungle.
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