Did You Know?
A Country That Is 99.98% Water Redrew the Date Line
Kiribati consists of 33 coral atolls and islands with a total land area of 811 square kilometres, scattered across roughly 3.5 million square kilometres of ocean.
Work out the ratio and the country is about one part land to four thousand three hundred parts sea. Around twenty of the atolls are habitable, and about 120,000 people live on them. Kiribati straddles both the equator and the 180th meridian, and is the only country on Earth that lies in all four hemispheres.
That geography created a problem that took until 1995 to fix.
The clock: when Kiribati became independent in 1979, the International Date Line ran straight through it.
The Gilbert Islands, including the capital Tarawa, were on UTC+12. The Phoenix and Line Islands, to the east, were on UTC−11 and UTC−10 — on the other side of the line. When it was Monday in Tarawa, it was Sunday on Kiritimati, a difference of 22 hours (23 to the Phoenix Islands) inside a single country.
Banking, shipping, government coordination and inter-island business all had to work across a gap where the two halves of the nation barely shared a working day.
President Teburoro Tito announced that from 1 January 1995 the date line would instead run along the eastern boundary of the republic.
The mechanism was simple and final. In the eastern islands, Friday 30 December 1994 was followed by Sunday 1 January 1995. They skipped 31 December entirely. The Phoenix Islands went to UTC+13 and the Line Islands to UTC+14 — the most advanced time zone in the world.
It was only realised afterwards what else this had done. The Line Islands were now the first inhabited places on Earth to enter each new day — which meant that five years later, Kiritimati would be first into the year 2000. The government marketed it accordingly.
One consequence is permanent. Between UTC+14 in Kiribati and UTC−12 at Baker Island, the maximum time difference on Earth is 26 hours. The two places are never on the same date.
A country that is almost entirely ocean moved the date line, to make its own islands agree what day it was.
Sources
- Utrecht University, *A History of the International Date Line*
- timeanddate.com, *Time Zone in Kiribati* (1979 independence and 23-hour internal time difference; only country in all four hemispheres)
- Wikipedia, *Time in Kiribati* and *Kiribati* (three zones: UTC+12, +13, +14; 811 km² of land; 3.44 million km² of ocean; administrative reasons for consolidation)
- timezone.io (December 1994 shift; UTC+14 being the world's furthest forward; not using DST)
- universaltimedate.com (maximum difference of 26 hours between UTC+14 and UTC−12; Baker Island)