Who is the furthest ahead in time zones

A time zone refers to a place on earth that uses a uniform standard time in order to streamline legal, social, and commercial activities. The time zones are defined by the boundaries of countries.

The largest difference between the time zones of two countries is 26 hours between the Howland Islands and the Line Islands. The clocks in the world are under the regulation of the Coordinated Universal Time UTC , which is not adjusted for daylight savings. The first Coordinated Universal Time was officially accepted in while the official abbreviations of the aforementioned times were adopted later on in Therefore, time zones in the world are obtained from the UTC.

Given that there are 24 hours in a day, it is logical to state that the biggest time difference between two points on earth would be 24 hours. Sandford Fleming must be turning in his grave! Welcome to the world of standard time, where the only international rule is keeping your clocks in sync with UTC aka Greenwich Mean Time. Everything else is open season. Everyone chooses their own standard time offset; everyone chooses when to switch to daylight saving time or even whether or not to use it at all ; everyone chooses their own time zone boundaries.

Many jurisdictions find it easier to manage their territory by having all of its territory under the same time zones, no matter how deviated from solar time they get. More often than not, time zones seem to get pushed to the east more often than they do to the west in order to take advantage of the sun. Also irregular because of this national standardization are the time differences between China and Pakistan three hours , India two-and-a-half hours , Nepal two hours and 15 minutes , Bhutan two hours , Myanmar 90 minutes , and the Russian Far East two or three hours depending on which time zone you cross into or from.

Nepal is centered just a slight bit to the east, resulting in that extra 15 minutes. The biggest time deviant may be Russia , which has been on permanent daylight saving time since the Soviet Union introduced it in As a result, the clocks are always well ahead of the sun, sometimes more than two hours in places.

Adding to the deviance, in , the Medvedev government abolished two entire time zones in an attempt to make the country easier to manage.

All together, there are now three different areas where you gain two hours crossing time zones instead of just one. This also creates an unusual situation in the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave, which is now an hour ahead of Lithuania to its east, and two hours ahead of neighboring Poland.

And that small section of far northern Norway that borders Russia? Though, sadly for the Americans, it left American Samoa marooned, only 70km away but 24 hours apart 25 in summer. When you remember that the Line Islands are further east than Hawaii and most of Alaska, this is pretty weird.

Most fun quirk of all of this means that for a brief moment every day sort of there are three days going on at once wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… you know the drill.

What a mess. You take your big country, helpfully divided into states running east to west, and you give them relevant time zones.

Job done. Which is sort of fine. But no. So for half the year, Australia goes from having three time zones to having five. Which makes it the only place in the world that does not switch a full hour for daylight saving time.

Apparently, with this time nonsense, you can basically just do what you want. This article is from the CityMetric archive: some formatting and images may not be present. Contact us. White papers from our partners. Siemens Smart Infrastructure.