how are time-zones calculated?

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how are time-zones calculated?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

They are political and not scientific. India is an interesting country that should have multiple time zones and will eventually split, but for unity and as part of the non-aligned political movement it went with a single time zone that was set off 30 minutes.

Spain is another interesting case. During the Franco regime it aligned its time zones to match with its ally Germany. Expect late sunsets in Spain as a result.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The general concept is that you pick a region for which the sun is overhead for exactly 1 hour. The sun travels at roughly 15 degrees of longitude per hour, so anything within those 15 degrees is one time zone. The Prime Meridian is the starting mark that everything else is based on.

The real answer, however, is that time zones are created by the laws of individual countries and are relatively arbitrary. For example, in 2015 North Korea shifted it’s time zone by half an hour, becoming the only country at +8:30, because they did not want to align with South Korea. In 2018, only 3 years later, they decided to switch back to +9:00.