You can imagine the trouble you would have communicating with people who are 6 to 12 hours ahead or behind your time! This is where time zones come in: you can plan your communication by calculating the time differences between you and the person you’re trying to reach, and suggest a time that suits you both.

If the person you are speaking to or who ships your product is in a different time zone, it may be midnight your time when it’s noon his or her time. Time zones are very important for commercial and social activities, legal reasons, military use, trade, and just about every other human activity on the planet.Īs long as two countries are in the same time zone, you won’t have any communication issues. Imagine the chaos this would cause: without agreeing on standard time, we wouldn’t be able to agree on, well, anything else. Without a standard time that all countries in a time zone must observe, the countries would never observe at the same time. This is because time zones aren’t about longitude but rather, latitude due to the rotation of the Earth.Īs you can imagine, noon is at different times in each country, which means that noon (12 PM) would be observed at different times from country to country corresponding to their position West or East. Time zones run horizontally rather than vertically: Moscow and Paris will have different time zones, but Cape Town and Madrid observe the same time. This way, it will be the same hour in all the countries and the cities in the particular time zone they observe. What Is a Time Zone?Ī time zone is a region on Earth that observes the same time. To find out why and to learn some fun time zone facts to outshine your trivia night rivals, let’s dig into the history, use, and curious facts about the UTC and time zones in general.

In addition to time zone confusion, UTC is often used instead of GMT, the Greenwich Mean Time. This means that if you’re trying to reach them at 10 AM your time, you’re calling them at 2 in the morning in LA! Needless to say, your Los Angeles friend won’t be happy to answer that call. For example, if you’re based in London, UK, and you’re calling someone in Los Angeles, US, keep in mind they’re eight hours behind you. Understanding time zones and the UTC time standard is essential if you’re traveling if you work with people in different countries, or simply for social reasons. Curiously, UTC is both a time standard and a time zone, and it’s frequently used to describe either… Confused yet? To shed light on the matter, let’s talk about what time zones really are, what UTC is, and what are some of the major countries and cities in UTC. (But it does make the land near the poles squashed-and-stretched, and countries near the equator look smaller than they should.When it comes to understanding world time, most people don’t know what UTC is and what the UTC time. So when we draw a map of the world we have to ask 'how will I fit the shapes on the curved surface on to the flat surface?' This is called Projection, and every method of projection has its good and bad points.įor the Sun Clock we used a special type of Cylindrical Projection called Plate Carrée, or Equirectangular Projection, because it works a bit like an x-y graph (which made the mathematics a lot easier): try wrapping a piece of paper around a ball! The Planet Earth's shape is similar to a Sphere, but maps are Flat. The timezone bar has no adjustment for Daylight Saving Time. Your device's local time is shown at the lower left corner, as well as 'UTC' time (the '0' time at the center of map). See at a glance who is in Day or Night, and follow the Sunset and Sunrise around the World.

Utc time clock online