There have been arguments to increase the length of each time zone to 2 or 3 hours.
Finally we have Russia, Belarus and Turkey grouped together in +3 UTC, although it is still debatable if Turkey is considered part of Europe. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Moldova, Roumania, Bulgaria and Greece are grouped together in +2 UTC. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy Germany, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia are all grouped together in +1 UTC. The UK, Portugal, Ireland and Iceland are grouped together in the 0 UTC. Islands are generally included with the large landmasses that are nearby although in cases like Indonesia that is one big archipelago there are multiple time zones spread across the country. This is because time zones only apply to landmasses above the oceans and will generally try to take sovereign territories into account. You can see that the each timezone on the world map above is not straight. Interestingly it is these tiny little countries that are the first to celebrate new years every year.Įach timezone is one hour in length so there are 24 separate time zones as there are twenty four hours in a day. The countries in this furthest timezone are territories like American Samoa and the Jarvis Islands. The World Map we have above is centred in Greenwich and to the left and right are the farthest points away from this line and are -11 hours away from Coordinated Universal Time. The map is based around what was formerly known as Greenwich mean time but is now known as Coordinated Universal Time. The world timezone map begins and ends at Greenwich a suburb of London in the UK. In this era of transcontinental corporations and business enterprises, time zones are more important than ever. Humans need to sleep and we generally do this activity at night time. They basically follow the cycle of the sun as the earth spins and different parts of the world face the sun. The planet earth is broken up into regions we call time zones.