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Did You Know?

Iceland Abolished Daylight Saving by Making It Permanent

Iceland holds a Guinness World Record for most published writers per capita. The commonly cited figure is that one in ten Icelanders will publish a book at some point in their life. A country of roughly 390,000 people releases about 1,500 new titles a year — one new book for every 260 citizens.

There is a word for the run-up to Christmas, when most of them come out at once: Jólabókaflóð, the Christmas Book Flood.

Meanwhile, at least 85 to 90% of homes in Iceland are heated by geothermal water pumped out of the ground. Reykjavík runs one of the largest district heating systems in the world. The same water heats greenhouses that grow tomatoes and cucumbers through the winter, and in places it is run under the pavements to melt the snow off them.

So: a country that answered darkness with books, answered cold by plumbing a volcano, and — as we will see — answered the clock question by keeping summer time permanently.

Three responses to the same extreme, and all three of them are still running.

Reykjavík sits at about 22° west. By longitude, Iceland belongs on UTC−1. Most of the country lies between 13° and 24° west, squarely in that zone.

Iceland runs on UTC+0 — the same clock as London in winter — all year, forever.

The result is one of the largest solar offsets in Europe. Reykjavík's clock runs roughly ninety minutes ahead of its own sun. Solar noon in Reykjavík falls around half past one in the afternoon. In mid-December, sunrise does not arrive until around eleven in the morning, in a day that offers about four hours of light in total.

That is further ahead than Madrid, at about seventy-five minutes.

How it happened. Iceland had used UTC−1 since 1907, with daylight saving on top of it. On 5 April 1968 the Althing — one of the world's oldest parliaments, founded in 930 — passed a law abolishing daylight saving and setting the national time zone to UTC+0. It came into force two days later.

Read that carefully, because it is the interesting part. Iceland did not go back to standard time. It went forward to summer time and stayed there.

The stated reasoning was that permanent UTC+0 would "eliminate all of the above problems, but would still preserve the benefits of summer time" — keeping Iceland in step with Europe for trade and telephone calls, while holding on to the extra evening light.

The clock: the argument against changing the clocks was, in Iceland's case, unusually strong.

At 64° north, the seasons are so extreme that an hour in either direction is close to meaningless. In summer there is so much daylight that an extra hour changes nothing. In winter there is so little that no clock adjustment can fix it. A country with wildly variable days concluded that adjusting for variable days was pointless.

Since 1994 there have been repeated proposals to the Althing to bring daylight saving back. Every one has been rejected.

So Iceland is the country that solved the clock-change argument by refusing to change back — and has spent every year since 1968 living permanently ninety minutes ahead of its own sky, on purpose, with no plans to stop.