Where does the sun rise first?
On our spinning spherical planet, the sun creeps endlessly over the horizon. But where does the first sunrise of the day occur? And with the sun setting quickly in 2022, where is the first light in the new year?
From a physical point of view, there is no “first” sunrise, according Cameron Hummels (Opens in a new tab), a postdoctoral scientist in theoretical astrophysics at Caltech. There is only a series of perpetual sunrises occurring farther and farther out in the West – not true first, nor true last.
But to keep track of time, humans have created an arbitrary time-keeping system, including time zones and International date line, which denotes the line where one day ends and the next begins on Earth. “So the agreed-upon ‘first’ sunrise of the day occurs at the International Date Line,” Hamels said.
The International Date Line runs through the center of the Pacific Ocean, mostly 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 protrudes approximately 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) east around Kiribati, a group of islands straddling the equator. Kiribati has the oldest time zone in a land, UTC +14, so, “For most of the year, such as near the equinox, it should be the first Kiribati sunrise of the day,” Hamill said. Specifically, Kiribati’s easternmost uninhabited Millennium Island, also known as Caroline Island, is often the first place on earth to welcome the sun.
Related: What is the most sunset you can see on Earth in one day?
However, this is not always the case. The Earth has a slight slope 23.5 degrees (Opens in a new tab), so the way sunlight falls on the planet changes throughout the year. through the south the summer solstice and northern solstice on December 21 or December 22, the sun It shines preferentially over the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere; Antarctica and most Antarctica It is lit 24 hours a day.
“But if you creep up just above 66.6 degrees south latitude, the sun will dip below the horizon for a brief period before making sunrise a few minutes after midnight,” Hamels said. Yonge Island, an uninhabited island claimed by New Zealand, will occasionally see its first sunrise on the days and weeks around the solstice, including January 1.
However, Young Island only gets the first sunrise of the day 10% to 15% of the time, according to US Naval Observatory (Opens in a new tab). The rest of the time, the light refraction effects of the Earth’s atmosphere are so strong that you can continue to see sunlight on Young Island even after the sun dips below the horizon, preventing a true sunset or sunrise. When this happens, Dibble Glacier, a peninsula on the Antarctic coast, gets the first sunrise of the day during the solstice.
around the northern and southern summer solstice winter Solstice June 20th to June 22nd, the Sun shines more directly in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere. So, the first sunrise will be the northernmost. “The International Date Line runs between Russia and Alaska and runs through the Bering Strait,” Hamels said. The date line bisects a pair of islands called the Diomede Islands. Big Diomede Island belongs to Russia, and Little Diomede is part of the United States In the weeks and even months leading up to June 21, the Russian island experiences the world’s first sunrise, Holmes said.
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