This article is a spin-off from our popular yearly review of political geography events. For more on changes to countries and borders in 2016, check out our main 2016 year in review article!
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| Free map of world time zones from Wikimedia Commons, up-to-date for the beginning of 2017. See the close-ups below for interactive, before-and-after illustrations of time zone changes during 2016. |
Article and additional graphics work by Evan Centanni
Who Controls Time Zones?
The system of dividing the world into time zones is accepted all around the world, in principle. It's an organized way of letting clocks in each part of the world hit noon around the middle of daylight hours, even if it's midnight on the other side of the world. But surprisingly, there's actually no international organization that determines time zones. Except for in the open ocean, where time zones are standardized by a
loose agreement between fleets and ship operators, the dividing lines are set independently by each country's government, or even by local governments below the national level.
