At the North Pole, 24 time zones converge to a point, and time as we measure it has no meaning. Sunrise, sunset, and noon come only once a year. The same has true at the South Pole, but Antarctica is a continent with people. They've worked out a system where each research station coordinates their clocks with their sponsoring nation. At the North Pole, the clocks are set wherever you want them. Most of the time, this is unimportant, as the Pole sits in the Arctic Ocean, and anyone who happens to be there is just passing through, with no reasons to change their clocks at all. But the research ship the RV Polarstern is deliberately locked in the ice for a year to study Arctic conditions, and it has a crew of 100 people from 20 countries. What time is it for them?
At the North Pole, it’s all ocean, visited only rarely by an occasional research vessel or a lonely supply ship that strayed from the Northwest Passage. Sea captains choose their own time in the central Arctic. They may maintain the time zones of bordering countries—or they may switch based on ship activities. Sitting here in my grounded office, it is baffling to think about a place where a single human can decide to create an entire time zone at any instant.
Last fall the Polarstern captain pushed the time zone back one hour every week, for six weeks, to sync up with incoming Russian ships that follow Moscow time. With each shift, the captain adjusted automatic clocks scattered around the ship. Researchers paused to watch the hands of analog clocks spin eerily backward. And every time the time changed, it jostled the delicate balance of clock-based communication—between instruments deployed on the ice, between researchers onboard, and between them and their families and colleagues on faraway land.
And you thought you had trouble adjusting to Daylight Saving Time! Read about how the Polarstern deals with time at the North Pole at Scientific American. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Janek Uin)