Admit it. Is there anyone out there who hasn’t wanted to “skip” a day now and then? After all it is Monday morning where I am writing right now.
If you lived in Samoa in the Pacific Ocean you got a chance to do just that – although you had to wait until the end of a Thursday – on Dec. 29, 2011 – when Samoa jumped straight from Thursday to Saturday, Dec. 31 – without a Friday, Dec. 30. Talk about being anxious to party New Year’s Eve!
Well, truth be told, that’s not quite the official explanation. You see, Samoa happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the International Date Line, an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days. Immediately to the left of the international date line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the International Date Line in the Western Hemisphere.
It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the International Date Line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the International Date Line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the International Date Line.
There is no regulatory body or agency that can say “yes” or “no” if a country wants to switch sides. The country simply lets the international community and mapmakers know. Samoa announced its most recent intentions last April.
The dateline, and standard time zones, courtesy of Canada’s Sir Sanford Fleming, conveniently divided into hourly segments, date back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.
Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time. Samoa uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+13:00) as standard time and UTC+14:00 as daylight saving time, which it observes during summer in the southern hemisphere. The U.S. territory of American Samoa, as well as the Midway Islands and the uninhabited islands of Jarvis, Palmyra, and Kingman Reef, use the Samoa Time Zone, which observes standard time by subtracting eleven hours from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-11). The zone is one hour behind the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone, one hour ahead of Howland and Baker islands, and 23 hours behind Wake Island Time Zone.
Pretty clear, eh?
But then there is China, which has just one time zone – Beijing Standard Time – making the time zone uncommonly wide. In Kashgar, in the extreme western part of China, the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.
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