ATLAS · TIME ZONES
The World’s Clocks vs the Sun
A time-zone map is usually a wall chart. This one is draped on the living globe — all 419 IANA time zonesas real boundary polygons — and coloured by something more interesting than the UTC offset: how far each zone’s clock diverges from the sun. The Earth turns 1° every 4 minutes, so every degree of longitude a zone stretches away from its clock’s natural meridian, local noon drifts 4 minutes from the sun’s highest point. Zones running ahead of the sun glow amber, zones running behind read blue, and zones keeping honest sun time fade into the map. Tap anywhere for the exact divergence at that point.
The Time Zonesswitch sits with the other overlays on the Atlas canvas — the zones draw over whatever metric (or the plain political map) you have up, with UTC offsets labelling every zone as you zoom in.
The zones that live furthest from their sun
Countries choose their clocks for trade, politics and daylight — not for the sun — and some choose to live a long way from it. Measured at each zone’s geographic centre, against its standard (winter) clock:
| America/Dawson | UTC−7 | +2 h 18 min |
| America/Nome | UTC−9 | +1 h 57 min |
| America/Coyhaique | UTC−3 | +1 h 55 min |
| America/Whitehorse | UTC−7 | +1 h 55 min |
| Antarctica/Rothera | UTC−3 | +1 h 55 min |
| Africa/El_Aaiun | UTC+1 | +1 h 53 min |
| Antarctica/Vostok | UTC+5 | −1 h 38 min |
| Antarctica/Troll | UTC+0 | −50 min |
| Antarctica/Macquarie | UTC+10 | −35 min |
| America/Maceio | UTC−3 | −33 min |
| America/Scoresbysund | UTC−2 | −29 min |
| Africa/Sao_Tome | UTC+0 | −28 min |
The champion is America/Dawson— Canada’s Yukon abolished clock changes in 2020 and stayed on permanent “Mountain” time, leaving Dawson City’s clocks +2 h 18 min ahead of its sun all winter. The figures above are zone-centre values; inside a widezone the divergence keeps growing away from the clock meridian — western China under Beijing time reaches +2 h and beyond, and westernmost Spain runs well past its zone-centre figure — which is exactly what the tap-anywhere readout on the globe is for.
419 zones, 37 standard offsets, and the date-line trick
The world’s clocks settle into 37 distinct standard offsets, and not all of them are whole hours: India runs on +5:30, Nepal on +5:45, Iran on +3:30, central Australia on +9:30, and the Chatham Islands on +12:45. 128 of the 419 zonesobserve daylight saving somewhere in the year. And at the far edge of the map sits the date-line trick: Kiribati’s Line Islands run on UTC+14— on paper a full day ahead of their longitude — yet their clocks sit only about half an hour from local sun time. The country moved its date across the line in 1995 so the whole nation would share one business week; the sun never noticed.
Time Zones Explained — Why the Clock on the Wall Isn't the Sun in the Sky →About this overlay & its data
The boundaries are the timezone-boundary-builderdataset (release 2026c) — the open, OpenStreetMap-derived compilation that underlies most serious time-zone lookups on the internet — simplified from its 170 MB source for the globe with every one of the 419 zones retained. UTC offsets come from the IANA Time Zone Database, the public-domain registry every operating system ships. The solar-vs-clock figure is the zone’s standard offset minus longitude × 4 minutes per degree, wrapped to the within-day remainder for zones across the date line — computed at the zone centre for the colouring, and at the exact point you tap for the popup. There are no per-zone pages, because “what time is it in X” is a clock, not a place.
Zone boundaries © OpenStreetMap contributors, via timezone-boundary-builder (ODbL). Offsets: IANA tz database (public domain). Snapshot 2026-07-18. Basemap © CARTO.