If you want to find out which are the 10 countries that have the most time zones, you’ve come to the right place.
Time zone is usually defined as a region of the globe that has a same standard time. Each time zone is calculated based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which represents the primary time standard in the world. Coordinated Universal Time replaced Greenwich Meridian Time (GMT), which was previously used to regulate clocks and time. UTC is more precise than GMT since it takes into consideration the leap seconds. Leap seconds are added to the UTC to keep it close to mean solar time, which is a time that is calculated using the motion of the mean sun. UTC is calculated using International Atomic Time (TAI) and Universal Time. International Atomic Time uses combined atomic clocks to determine the speed of clock’s ticking while the Universal Time uses Earth’s rotation and is GMT’s successor. Where do the time zones fit, you may ask? Before you find out, consider checking out our list of 10 Freest Countries in the World.
Well, time zones are a must if we want to keep the world in line. Each time zone represents a positive or negative offset from UTC. UTC is placed on the prime meridian and its longitude is 0°. Heading east, each 15° longitude marks one hour behind UTC and one time zone. Heading west, each 15° longitude marks one hour ahead of UTC. So, due to this, countries with large territory have different time zones. At least some of them do. For example, China and India should have different time zones, but that isn’t the case since these countries decided to apply one time zone to the whole territory. If China, for example, decided to use time zones based on 15° longitude rule, there would be approximately 8 time zones in the country. Some countries don’t use the “full hour offset” from UTC like India, which has an offset of UTC +5:30.
UTC does not recognize the daylight saving time, so the countries that use this have one hour added or subtracted to the offset from UTC depending on their location. Daylight saving time is achieved by adjusting the clock one hour forward to get one additional hour of daylight in the summer. This practice has faced with much criticism recently and some countries are abandoning it. One of the examples is Russia since the country recently decided to stick with standard time all year round. Some countries decided to implement daylight saving time through the whole year instead of standard time, like Argentina. Still, the practice of daylight saving time is used in the United States and most of Europe.
To find out which countries belong to our list of 10 countries that have the most time zones we took the data from World Atlas that has accounted in the time zones for overseas territories of the countries as well. Note that each time zone is stated in UTC offset and used as a standard time in a particular country or territory. Without further ado, here is our list.
