eli5: why isn’t the international date line a straight line?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You may not know this, but you are peering down a deep rabbit hole when talking about the date line and more broadly time zones. Time zones are an obvious enough concept once you understand how geography works: the main physical indicator of the time we have is that “noon” is when the sun is directly overhead, but that is different depending on where you happen to be on the planet. But what a lot of people disagree on is exactly how they ought to work – because of this, timezone lines often don’t follow the longitude lines you might expect, but political boundaries.

As others have noted, there are islands around which the International Date Line zig-zags around, usually to help islands close to Australia and New Zealand stay more synchronized with those nations.

There are also some places where there are time zones like GMT+9.5 hours or other fraction-hour offsets. This causes programmers [no small amount](https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY) of difficulty.

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