People wake up, go to work, return from it, make an appointment and plan meetings, checking with the clock. Local time for a person is an obvious and natural concept, especially if he does not travel outside his time zone. So, a Muscovite usually does not need to think about the fact that when it was two in the afternoon in the capital, it was already evening in Vladivostok and it was deep night in California.
This redundant information becomes important in travel. When planning trips, booking ahead of time hotels, connecting transfers and buying tickets, it is necessary to take into account that planes fly out according to local time, the same applies to other types of transport. The sites and tickets indicate the time of the time zone in which the airport or train station is located.
Day and World Time
What are time zones, world and local time? These concepts are best disclosed through the simplest things. The earth rotates from west to east around its axis, making a complete turn in about 24 hours. This period of time is generally called day, it is a universal unit of time.
World time, it is indicated by the Latin abbreviation UTC, is also a universal standard for most countries. The values of all other time zones are based on it. UTC is calculated using the most accurate atomic clocks. The starting point of world time is the zero meridian (its other names are the initial or Greenwich), which connects the two poles of the Earth and passes through a specific place in London.
Time zones are the positive (eastern) or negative (western) longitude offsets from the Greenwich meridian taken as zero. This can be illustrated by a simple example: you need to determine the Moscow local time. This is easy to do, if it is known that in London it is noon, then in Moscow, which lies three time zones to the east, it will be three in the afternoon.
Date change
On the opposite side of the planet’s prime meridian is the date line. Here there is a change of day on Earth. The place for the line was not chosen by chance. Firstly, it, along with the Greenwich line, symmetrically divides the planet in half. Secondly, mainly the date line runs along the desert waters of the Pacific Ocean, where there is almost no continental territory and islands are rarely found.
Formally, the line corresponds to the 180 ° meridian, but in fact in some places it deviates so as not to cross political states with the same local time. This helps to avoid potential confusion with dates within the same country.
Time Zones
Local time is a specific, proper time for each point on the planet. It depends on the coordinates, more precisely on the geographical longitude of the place in which time is determined. But the Earth is constantly rotating, making a full rotation of 360 degrees in 1440 minutes. It is easy to calculate that it rotates one degree in 4 minutes. If every city, every point on the planet had its own time, then humanity would face enormous problems. There would have been confusion in the overall work of transport, institutions, shops, and industries.
Therefore, time zones were invented, according to which the whole world lives. The earth is divided into twenty-four time zones with the help of meridians running in increments of 15 degrees. The Greenwich Meridian is the zero point of reference. Local time is the same at any point within the same belt, and with other belts the time differs by whole hours. True, there are states that live in one specially approved time zone. So, the territory of Kataya is located in five generally accepted zones, but according to the decision of the authorities in the whole Chinese state there is a single time.
History of standard time in Russia
Geographically, our vast country stretches into eleven time zones: from the Kaliningrad region with a time zone of UTC + 2 to Kamchatka, where UTC + 12. Moscow time is the main one for the state; local time is considered relative to it in all parts of Russia.
For the first time, zone time was established in the USSR in 1919. Before that, how much time was determined locally by the sun for each city, or the clock hands were set by time in the provincial city.
In 1932, a special maternity time was introduced, which shifted the clock hands an hour ahead of the standard time. So the Union government tried to more efficiently use the light part of the day and save energy.
Since 1981, the country began to live in two times: winter and summer. At the end of March of each year, one more hour was added to maternity time, and at the end of October this hour was taken away.
In 2011, a new law on temporary calculation in the Russian Federation entered into force. The law abolished daylight saving time and daylight saving time, and also replaced the concept of local time with local time and the time zone with the time zone. Now local time is the time of the time zone in which the corresponding city or territory is located.
Time zones today
The law was amended several more in 2014 and 2016. There are now officially eleven time zones in Russia. Moreover, all regions and administrative units are included in only one separate time zone. An exception is Yakutia: its territory is so large that it is located in three zones.