Where is gmt 14

When Kiribati was granted sovereignty over the Line Islands in , shortly after itself gaining independence from the United Kingdom, it found they posed a chronological puzzle. The trouble was their new additions were the other side of the International Date Line which meant that when it was, say, Saturday in Tarawa, which is the most heavily-populated of the Kiribati atolls, it would be Friday on Kiritimati also known as Christmas Island in the Line Islands to the east.

The International Date Line is one of the messier reminders that the time we set our watches by is not preordained but rather an ingenious human construct. In the case of Kiritamati and Tarawa, they were divided by a whole, unambiguous day. Government offices became exasperated by only being able speak to one another four days a week and so, figuring the date line to be largely fictitious anyway, they moved it.

They are guided by the light — the Earth rotates, causing the sun to rise and set, and our local times of day reflect this — but the rigidity of their contours are an example of how society relies on the fabrication of some sort of consensual reality.

Usually this is straightforward enough that we can just accept it. Time zones were created partly as a response to the creation of the railroads and the need for precise departure times, and partly as a response to being able — for the first time — to move and communicate across great distances at a high speed. As you might imagine, it was always quite hard to get jet lag while travelling on foot.

Oddly though, the quirks of time zones have made doing so easier. This border happens to consist of a forbidding stretch of mountains that contains no roads and is impassable for at least four months of the year — but still. Of course, readers in the Pacific may find a leap of three and a half hours a walk in the park. Back in Kiribati, one of the strangest of the many strange things about the earliest time zone in the world is that it is just next door to the latest time zone in the world.

The TAG Heuer Aquaracer, with its bi-directional, bi-coloured hour bezel has a neat, sleek ability to track multiple time zones. Seb Emina Writer. The zones are based on 24 longitudinal meridian lines that run from the north to south poles.

The prime meridian, determined by the conference, runs through Greenwich, in the UK, giving us Greenwich Mean Time. Other time zones are counted to the east and west of this line, either plus or minus hours from GMT. Each country sets its own time zone within this framework, so some zones extend beyond the meridian for convenience, while others, like India, take on half hours.

Kiribati even extended its time zone miles east in , to include Caroline Island in the same zone and, as it straddled the Date Line opposite the GMT meridian, the same date as the country's other islands. The development of the world wide web in the s led to calls for a standardised internet time, as people in cyberspace were no longer bound by geography.

Swatch even invented a concept called beat time that split each day into 1, beats on a decimal system, eradicating time zones entirely. For those of you who don't operate on Internet Time, this spreadsheet shows the time zone in countries, extracted from our World Factfiles series. Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at datastore guardian. Turn autoplay off Turn autoplay on.

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