Time Zones: Tin City, US vs Naukan, Russia

I think I can clear this specific anomaly up: if you check the sunrise time on both pages on the timeanddate site, it is vastly different, and this indicates the 4-hour difference is about allocating timezones, and kind of tidying them up a bit in regions where the earth’s circumference is smaller.

The missing 4 hours on the "time now" clocks shows back up in the Sunrise & Sunset.

Russia, Nuokan: Sunrise today 03:40, Sunset 19:00



Alaska, Tin City: Sunrise today 07:35, Sunset 22;50



Two points with the same latitude (North/South position relative to the Equator), or at least very close, as these have, will have the same Sunrise & Sunset time, regardless of longitude (distance apart along the East-West axis).

If there was a real 4-hour’s worth of distance stretching East-West between the two locations, the relative sunrise time should be about the same, both would be the same distance North from the equator, so the sun would be at the same relative position in the sky at 03:40 am local time, for both.

So I think this one is some timezones (as in artificiallly created) being "tucked into" that small ocean gap, instead of anything to do with their actual distance.

It's a lot more than 4 hours. That's the intl date line. Is 16hrs difference.

Timezones are messed up.

Not 16 – Alaska is 4 hours "ahead" of Russia in timezone terms, for both current time and sunrise & sunset times.

The confusing thing on first glance is that the clocks (current time) are 4 hours apart, in timezone terms, whereas the geography on maps suggests they are very close to each other.

But the sunrise also happens at very different times, 3.40am, and 7.35am. The sun is hitting both places around the same time (60 miles is nothing).

So that shows it's the artificial timezone which is "wrong," and not missing landmass on a map.

If sunrise in both places was at similar times (say, 03.40am for Nuokan, 03.35am for Tin City) THAT would be proof of missing landmass on the map.

It would mean there were 4 whole timezone’s worth of land (almost the width of north America) missing from maps, and at each one the sun rises at around 03.40am today for its local time.

So this compression of 4 hours’ worth of timezones into a narrow oceanic strait is an administrative convenience for time-zoning, at a location where the earth’s circumference is much smaller than the equator. Nothing more.

There are many unexplained things described on this site (African sand scar and northern polar continent that disappears from maps for example) but this isn’t one of them.

And PS the dateline is at a fixed location on maps for convenience, but in practice, it also moves around the world, it can be Tuesday night in New York and early Wednesday morning in Paris.

Eva is spot on, at least as far as we can trust timeanddate's information. I personally wouldn't mind if we had some more direct information, but seeing as how Naukan, Russia is abandoned, I doubt we could get anyone to verify. It appears that Uelen, Russia is the furthest East settlement and timeandate does have similar sunrise times to Naukan (within a minute).

So again, presuming these times are accurate and presuming the sun has similar behavior to what we witness further south, the two locations would have to be relatively close to 60 miles apart. I think it's also worth noting that timeanddate has nearly identical listings for the locations of sunrise and sunset for the two towns (63/64 degrees NE and 297 degrees NW respectively). So any potential for debunking the relative locations of these towns would have to involve invalidating timeanddate's numbers (which I seem to recall seeing criticism about in the past, but I can't specifically recall where, let alone vouch for the reliability of it).

So JonLevi discussed this timezone issue in his recent video, starting at 11 minutes:



Not to pick on Jon, I enjoy a lot of his work and to be clear, he’s citing another video, but it drives me a little bit crazy when these little pieces of “information” seem to make the rounds on YouTube without anyone digging deeper into it. As explained by Eva in this thread, there is no large “real time” discrepancy here as far as the available information is showing. It’s an illusion of the time zones, not an indication of missing land/sea or a vanishing sun. Doesn’t mean that time zones aren’t a bit peculiar or that there aren’t issues with world maps, but unless you have some serious evidence that timeanddate falsifies their sunrise/sunset data, there’s nothing here but a misunderstanding.

Maybe I shouldn’t care but when one of the big alternative history channel just repeats this claim without doing due diligence, it reflects badly on a lot of other work being done out there. This obviously isn’t a problem if you truly do your research, but for anyone just dipping their toe into the field it can be a bit off putting. It’s similar to the disdain I have for the reductive terms like “mudflood”, “reset”, and “Tartaria.” Those are aspects of this research, but far from a one size fits all skeleton key.