We went to bed on Friday, March 1, and woke up on Sunday, March 3. We lost a whole day! Where did it go? They said that they would give it back to us, but only 1 hour at a time. It all had to do with something called "The International Date Line." In theory, the Prime meridian runs from the North Pole to the South Pole through the town of Greenwich, England. If it is noon on Sunday, and if you travel east, every so often you need to set your watch ahead 1 hour in order to keep sunrise and sunset at the same hour and minute that it will be in Greenwich. Travel farther, and you need to set it forward another hour. This change is for every 15 degrees you travel. If you travel 180 degrees to the east, it will be 12 hours later, or midnight Sunday. However, if you travel 15 degrees to the west of Greenwich, it will be 1 hour earlier, or 11:00 in the morning. The farther west you go, always assuming that the actual travel takes no time, the earlier it will be. So if you travel 165 degrees west, it will be 1)) in the morning on Sunday. Then, another 15 degrees, it will be midnight on Saturday. But wait. 180 degrees east of Greenwich and 180 degrees west of Greenwich is the same place! How can it be midnight Saturday and also midnight Sunday? Therein lies the problem. So, to correct this problem, some wise minds decided that it would be Sunday, and drew a line at 180 degrees where the day would change. But that caused problems. People could not see the line and national boundaries were no respecter of this imaginary line, so the cartographers decided to reroute the line east or west to keep all the parts of these island nations on the same time. This makes for a very crooked line.
But wait -- it gets stranger yet. Other countries also wanted to have the whole country on the same time, so that's what they did. All of China is on the same time, even though it covers what should be 5 or 6 time zones. If the sun rises at 4:00 on one side of the country, then it rises at 8:00 or 9:00 on the other side of the country. Even more confusing, some countries ignore the whole hours and choose a time a half hour off from their neighbors. Australia's east coast is 10 hours ahead of Greenwich and it's west coat is 8 hours ahead. Therefore it should have 3 time zones with the middle of the country 9 hours ahead. But no, they have 3 zones, but the middle of the country is 9 1/2 hours ahead, so the time is closer to the time in Sydney on the east coast than to the time in Perth on the west coast.
Now I won't even get into Daylight Savings Time. What does it really save?
We lost Saturday, so you think we crossed the International Date Line sometime on Friday night (or early on the Saturday we did not have.) Well, they told us this morning that we will actually cross it this afternoon, but we will not cross 180 degrees until tomorrow.
Thoroughly confused? So am I.
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