[tz] Antarctic research base Vostok local time

L. David Baron dbaron at dbaron.org
Wed Dec 20 01:34:22 UTC 2023


On Tuesday 2023-12-19 11:04 -0800, Paul Eggert via tz wrote:
> -# From Lee Hotz (2001-03-08):
> -# I queried the folks at Columbia who spent the summer at Vostok and this is
> -# what they had to say about time there:
> -# "in the US Camp (East Camp) we have been on New Zealand (McMurdo)
> -# time, which is 12 hours ahead of GMT. The Russian Station Vostok was
> -# 6 hours behind that (although only 2 miles away, i.e. 6 hours ahead
> -# of GMT). This is a time zone I think two hours east of Moscow. The
> -# natural time zone is in between the two: 8 hours ahead of GMT."

One observation about this 22-year-old quote:  New Zealand (then and
now) observed summer time for roughly half of the year, so "which is
12 hours ahead of GMT" was only correct for the southern hemisphere
winter; in the summer New Zealand was 13 hours ahead.

If the observation of a 6 hour difference between McMurdo and Vostok
was in the southern hemisphere summer while New Zealand was on
summer time, that observation could be consistent with Vostok
observing UTC+7 at the time.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                        https://dbaron.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)



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