International Date Line Dillema?

Question

So if you cross the IDL wesward, you gain a day. But if you go to the north pole and start circling it a thousand times going west every time you cross the IDL, will you gain 1000 days?

Oh shut up. I know perfectly well that I won't gain 1000 days, I'm just trying to understand what your time would be if you crossed it a lot of times without a day actually passing. Like, do you take a day back after crossing the Prime Meridian westward? What's the explanation for it?

It's clear from your answer you have zero sense of "humor".

Bigman.

Answer 1

No. You gain 24 hours when you cross the IDL, but you lose 1 hour every time you cross a time zone. There are 24 of them.

So, by the time you get back to the IDL, you have lost 24 hours and you are right back where you started (except for the time it took to go around the world).

Answer 2

It's an arbitrary line which makes it easier to divide the days up, which is needed because, at any one time, each part of the world is at a different part of the solar day.

Let's take your circling of the Earth, but not at the poles first. If you're at the equator and travel west extremely fast, you cross the date line and Sunday becomes Monday. Keep travelling that fast, and let's say it was 6pm at the date line. When you reach Auckland, it's 6pm. In Sydney, 4pm, When you get to Jakarta, it's 1pm, Islamabad 11am, Jerusalem 8 am, London 6am, New York 1am, Los Angeles 10pm ... hang on, that means it's still Sunday night in Los Angeles. So Honolulu is 8pm Sunday night, so when you reach the date line it's 6pm Sunday night. Cross it, and it's the same time Monday again.

That's if you're getting from one place to the next instantly, which is impossible, but useful to illustrate. The point is, as you go west you're moving back in time on the clock. That's why there's a date line, so we're all actually on the same 24-hour period, but not necessarily the same day.

If you're very close to the pole, you actually could do that. There's not much point talking about time of day since the sun would hardly move, but in the above experiment you would theoretically move back in clock time each day until you reached the date line on the "previous" calendar day, then cross it to be on the day you started, then move back through the hours again until it's "yesterday", then cross the date line...

The important point for your question is, you don't gain the days, because before you cross the IDL, as you go west you're travelling to an earlier time on that day.

Answer 3

no, the international date line for days depends on a point based on the equator

Answer 4

It's just terribly clear from the nature of your question that you simply don't have a single clue about 'reality'.

Doug