The International Date Line
Day 119 / 365
Time Travel is all the craze right now with Avengers Endgame in the cinemas. While actual time travel might still be limited to comic books and movies, there are still scenarios where you can go back and forward in time, at least in some sense.
Consider this flight from South Korea to
You would take off fom Seoul on 4:30 PM on a Tuesday, and you would land in LA at 11:30 AM in the morning on the same day!
I know it’s kind of cheating cause there’s different time zones involved, but it’s still quite interesting, landing at a time earlier than the one you took off in. For this to happen, you would have to cross an imaginary line on the earth known as the International Date Line.
Just like we have lines on the globes separating different time zones, the International Date Line actually separates 2 different calendar dates!
When you cross the International Date Line from west to east, you subtract a day, and if you cross the line from east to west, you add a day.
Different dates at the same time
For the two hours between 10:00 and 11:59 UTC each day, three different calendar dates are observed at the same time in different places on Earth.
For example, at 10:15 UTC Thursday it is —
- 23:15 Wednesday in American Samoa (UTC−11:00),
- Thursday in most of the world, and
- 00:15 Friday in Kiritimati (UTC+14:00)
This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — Nostradamus