The world's strangest time zones
45-minute offsets, islands 24 hours apart just a few kilometers away: a tour of time zone oddities around the world.
Some time zones go well off the beaten path, for historical, political or geographic reasons.
The Chatham Islands (New Zealand) use a UTC+12:45 offset, one of the very few in the world expressed to the quarter hour.
The Bering Strait separates Big Diomede Island (Russia) from Little Diomede Island (United States), just 4 km apart but nearly 24 hours apart in date, because of where the International Date Line falls.
China, despite spanning a geographic width that would theoretically cover 5 time zones, has used a single time (UTC+8) across the entire country since 1949, for reasons of national unity.
Kiribati, a Pacific archipelago, moved its eastern islands to the other side of the date line in 1995 so the whole country would share the same date — making it, in effect, one of the first places on Earth to see the sun rise each day.
Explore these oddities directly on our world clock.
Handy tools
Find the time slots that work across several time zones at once.
Convert a time from one city to several others at a glance.
The exact dates for the switch to and from daylight saving time in Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia, calculated automatically every year.