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Kiribati, a small country surrounded by the blue sea made up of 33 islands in the Pacific Ocean, is designated as the place where the sun first rises. Photo/Juggage
According to Cameron Hummels, a theoretical astrophysicist at Caltech, on our rotating, spherical planet, the sun endlessly creeps beyond the horizon. There is just a series of continuous sunrises that occur further and further west, none to rise first, none to set last.
To keep track of time, humans have created globally agreed systems of timekeeping, including time zones and the international date line. This is to mark a line on Earth where one day ends and the next begins.
“So the agreed ‘earliest’ sunrise occurs on the international date line,” Hummels said as quoted by the Live Science page on Monday (5/12/2022).
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The International Date Line crosses the center of the Pacific Ocean, mainly along the 180th meridian. While it is mostly a straight line, there are some points where it deviates to avoid dividing a country into two time zones or for political and economic reasons.
For example, the International Date Line extends nearly 3,200 kilometers east around Kiribati, a group of islands that sits on the equator. Kiribati has the earliest time zone on Earth, UTC +14.
“So, most of the year, like close to the equinox, Kiribati gets the first sunrise of the day,” Hummel said.
Specifically, that place is the easternmost uninhabited island of Kiribati, namely the Millennium Island known as Caroline Island. The island, also called Millennium Island, is often the first place on Earth to greet the sun.
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