What countries have more time zones than most continents?
Where can you time travel just by crossing a country's border?
Find out as we look at the Strangest Time Zones In The World.
Number 14 Arizona & Tribes Though often sharing time zones with neighbors
California and Nevada, Arizona is unique among states as it is the only one in the continental
US to not recognize Daylight Savings Time!
Thus, all year long it remains Mountain Standard Time.
To make matters stranger, the Navajo Nation territory does recognize it, and within that
territory, the Hopi Reservation sides with Arizona!
A single trip straight through The Grand Canyon State could require up to seven clock adjustments!
Number 13 Newfoundland The basis for time zone standards originates
with the Greenwich Observatory, an early hub for scientific research, and as such is known
as Greenwich Mean Time, or Coordinated Universal Time depending on the region.
The majority of time zones use this meridian as the basis for scaling their own time zones
and most places do so in increments of one hour.
But Newfoundland had their own agenda.
Due to its geographical location on the cusp of an earlier time zone, as well as their
natural want to differentiate from the rest of Canada, Newfoundland established a difference
of three and a half hours from Greenwich Mean Time!
This means Newfoundland is the first place in North America to receive most anything,
often having the honor of premiering products and media to the western world.
Number 12 Greenland Not too far from Newfoundland , the nation
of Greenland is a large landmass that houses multiple time zones within its borders.
A lot of the country runs on an average of three hours behind Coordinated Universal Time,
but a handful of areas can offset your internal clock in a with their drastic variance.
The weather station known as Danmarkshavn runs their clocks on coordinated universal
time, while the US Air Force running the Thule Air Base there operate at four hours behind
Greenwich . And then there's Ittoqqortoormiit , the nation's 18th-largest city, which strangely
runs two hours ahead of most of the nation.
Add the long days and nights during the different seasons, a characteristic of far north regions,
and time in Greenland can get confusing to say the least!
Number 11 Lord Howe Island Off the coast of Australia, the strange isle
known as Lord Howe Island maintains a 30 minute difference with the mainland territory of
New South Wales.
Made official with the Standard Time Act of 1971, Lord Howe Island has a time that's about
ten and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, or Coordinated Universal Time as its
also known.
It isn't the only place in this part of the world to utilize these half hour additions
to the time zone, but they do make use of one strange alteration in the Lord Howe Daylight
Time.
Rather than the full hour employed by most, this is simply a 30-minute alternative to
Daylight Saving Time.
This is done for no reason other than to align clocks with their nearest trade partners,
the people of New South Wales...hundreds of miles away!
Number 10 Nepal Not to be out done by the weird half-hour
time zone intervals some nations have adopted, the country of Nepal has taken the matter
a step further with the use of a 15 minute difference!
Meaning that while neighboring nations like India proceed at 5 and a half hours ahead
of Greenwich Mean Time, Nepal actually operates at five and three-quarters hours ahead.
Originally the country shifted from local solar time to Indian Standard Time in 1920,
but 66 years later they decided to offset clocks by 15 minutes as a sign of independence.
So if you left Nepal at 5:45 pm and crossed the border for China, which is eight hours
ahead of the universal time standard, you'd be moving your clock 2 hours and 15 minutes
forward to accommodate the change of scenery.
Number 9 Australia While definitely a massive country and continent,
Australia's various time zones are still surprisingly all over the place.
The standard time zones throughout the nation's mainland include the Australian Western Standard
Time and Australian Eastern Standard Time, which follow the typical pattern of hour differentials.
Time zones like the Australian Central Western Standard Time are employed uniquely as the
small desolate town known as Eucla is the only place in the country to have a time zone
8 and a half hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time.
Another distinct area with its own clock is Broken Hill within New South Wales which uses
Australian Central Standard Time...putting it 30 minutes behind the rest of its state.
To top it off, half of the territories in the country use Daylight Saving Time while
the other half refuses.
This results in a potential three hour difference from Sydney to Perth, despite being relatively
closer than the East and West coasts of the United States!
Number 8 Kiribati Twenty four hour days might give the sense
that time zones max out at twelve hours ahead or behind the universal time standard, but
that is far from the truth.
The collection of islands in the Pacific Ocean known as Kiribati take that theorized limit
to the extreme with three separate time zones escalating from twelve to fourteen hours ahead
of Greenwich Mean Time.
To demonstrate how big of a time gap this creates, one only need to look at the nearby
Jarvis Island which is 24 to 25 hours behind the Line Islands Time Zone.
In theory, you could put cookies out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve in Kiribati , open
presents the next day, eat dinner, then fly to Jarvis Island to put cookies out for Santa
all over again!
Number 7 China Despite having one of the densest populations
around, the whole nation of China works on a unilateral time schedule.
At eight hours ahead of the standard universal time zone, entering this country is almost
always a leap through time thanks to neighboring nations operating anywhere from three hours
ahead to three hours behind China.
To combat the strange issues of this shared time zone across thirty one hundred miles
of land, an unofficial secondary time zone in the large western region of Xinjiang makes
life a bit more feasible.
With an adjusted time of six hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time, Chinese residents
in this area can avoid oddities like waiting past midnight for nightfall!
Number 6 Russia It's no wonder that the world's largest country
by landmass also happens to maintain a collection of different time zones, but few might imagine
that collection to be as many as eleven separate times.
From the far Western Kaliningrad Time of 2 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time and the
Northeastern Kamchatka Time reaching 12 hours ahead, Russia perpetuates a 10 hour difference
between borders.
The majority of these time zones were established during the Soviet Union, but they've withheld
throughout a litany of revisions.
From 2010 to 2014, Russia moved from 11 to 9 and back to 11 separate zones, with new
hour additions and subtractions fluctuating the times to which citizens had grown accustomed.
Like many sovereignties, these changes were employed with the hopes of bolstering economic
progress as Russia hopes to sculpt the perfect time table for achieving optimum output.
Number 5 Argentina This South American nation has had quite the
history of time zone rearrangements since its initial standardization in 1984.
The original time of four hours behind Coordinated Universal Time shifted to three hours with
Daylight Saving Time from 1920 to 1969.
Then, from 1974 to 1993, it switched back and forth from three to two hours beyond Greenwich
Mean Time, before establishing the three hour difference as the official Argentina Time
zone.
Daylight Saving Time is determined nationally on a yearly basis with individual provinces
having the option of opting out of the clock adjustment entirely.
This has resulted in sporadic periods where Argentinians have had to move clocks forward.
This has occurred in the summers of 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, and 2007 to 2009!
Number 4 Egypt At two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time,
Egypt sits as the middle ground between the Middle East and West Africa.
Abiding by Eastern European Standard Time, Egypt is one of the few African nations to
run on this time schedule.
But this role took a back seat in 2014 after Daylight Saving Time was reinstated in hopes
of helping reduce resource consumption in the midst of an energy crisis.
Then, when the Muslim holiday of Ramadan came, the clocks all switched back an hour...before
jumping forward for the remainder of the Summer.
This was a one-off incident for the country, but not many other nations can say they've
had to shift clocks four times in a single year!
Number 3 Spain The Spanish originally had a time zone equivalent
to Coordinated Universal Time and no daylight saving time when they first adopted this system
in 1901.
Daylight saving time was enacted and abolished many times before becoming a permanent fixture
in response to the 1973 oil crisis.
In 1940, though, Spain would change to Central European Time in accordance with the rest
of a German-occupied Europe, placing them an hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.
This made for quite the time hop within their own borders with the westernmost region of
Galicia now two hours behind the rest of the country!
Opponents of the Central European Time zone argue it slows the country's economy.
The culturally particular nature of Spain's late meals and early naps are attributed to
this strange schedule.
Perhaps one day they will switch back!
Number 2 The Samoas If you're really looking to time travel, there's
no better place than the Samoa islands.
The independent nation of Samoa and the American Samoa territory sat just to the east of the
international dateline for years, putting the tropical islands at the tail end of each
day and better in sync with the United States.
But as economic relations with Australia and New Zealand strengthened, Samoa decided to
break away from this tradition.
Moving west of the dateline in 2011, Samoa jumped ahead a full day and became one of
the first nations to great the rising sun daily.
Now American Samoa is 24 hours behind the sovereign isles, 25 in the summer, making
it possible to jump from Sunday straight to Tuesday, skipping Mondays entirely!
And all you would need to do is fly about 10 minutes!
Number 1 Afghanistan This middle eastern nation bordering China
functions on its own aptly named Afghanistan Time year round.
Ignoring any sort of daylight saving time, the country is one of few oddballs to implement
a half hour increment in their difference from the Coordinated Universal Time.
With a variety of time zones surrounding it, Afghanistan can serve as a time-jumping central,
as the potential of jumping forward or back in time 30 minutes, or even three hours, is
just a border crossing away.