Time
In most places on Earth, local time is determined by longitude, such that the time of day is more-or-less synchronised to the position of the sun in the sky (for example, at midday the sun is roughly at its highest). This line of reasoning fails at the South Pole, where the sun rises and sets only once per year, and all lines of longitude, and hence all time zones, converge. There is no a priori reason for placing the South Pole in any particular time zone, but as a matter of practical convenience the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station keeps New Zealand Time. This is because the US flies its resupply missions ("Operation Deep Freeze") out of McMurdo Station which is supplied from Christchurch, New Zealand.
Read more about this topic: South Pole
Famous quotes containing the word time:
“I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Before the time I did Lysander see,
Seemed Athens as a paradise to me.
O then, what graces in my love do dwell,
That he hath turned a heaven unto a hell?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say.”
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937)