No part of Alaska is on the ‘other side’ of the International Date Line. The majority of the state is on Alaska Time (standard time is UTC -9) (despite covering more than 30º of longitude), with some of the western Aleutians, including Semisopochnoi Island, on Hawaii-Aleutian Time (UTC -10).
The International Date Line only has a little bit to do with 180º from the Prime Meridian. It’s simply a matter of which time zone the country decides to be in. That’s why there isn’t really a ‘line’ to be crossed except in the case of international borders or if you decide to change clocks when on the ocean. In Alaska’s case it’s even two hours off from where it ‘ought’ to be if you consider that 180º ‘ought’ to be UTC +/- 12.
Also, I said ‘latitude’ in my earlier post when I meant ‘longitude’. :smack:
The Greenwich-based lat-long system was standardized mainly so that ships of different nationalities could exchange navigation information without tedious and error-prone mathematical conversion. So it’s basically meant for navigation. We use it for other purposes, but there are times (and this is one of them) where it doesn’t make sense to use it.
The US is not the only country where using the Greenwich zero point leads to such silliness. The 180th meridian goes through part of Russia, for example.[sup]1[/sup] Are you going to insist that the westernmost point in Russia is a thin line located one yoctometer east of the 180 meridian? Most people would not agree.
For those who want to set up our own meridian in the US, we did have one before everyone[sup]2[/sup] agreed to use Greenwich in the 1880s. It was based on the Naval Observatory in Washington DC. Because of this, most of the north-south state boundaries in western states are about 7 minutes (IIRC) off whole-number Greenwich meridians.
[sup]1[/sup] Fiji and Kiribati also bracket the 180th meridian, and thus have the same issue.
[sup]2[/sup] Well, the French were all pissy about it, but they eventually came around.
The new year comes only ten days after the winter solstice. At that time of year, for two points at the same longitude, the more southerly one will have an earlier sunrise and a later sunset.
So, does the easternmost point of Maine still get the first sunrise of the new year, or does that southerly advantage give it to some place like Cape Cod or the coast of Florida? And by how many minutes are they separated?
The time of sunrise at various points on the eastern seaboard on December 31, 2008 (the site I link only lists through the end of th year that I can figure out). Assuming accuracy of the site, of course.
I think the XKCD comic linked above summarizes the various arguments perfectly.
When your reference point (“me” in the comic) is more or less on the other side of the world from Greenwich, then the “east oughta be West & vice versa” issue comes to the fore.
If your reference point is in, say, Berlin, then East & Easternmost are in the same direction.
Finally, because we are on a sphere, wherever your set your reference point there is going to ba a place where proceeding east & proceding west from reference meet up on the other side, and at the point you will have a discontinuity. The folks above who’re trying to say that any definition containing a discontinuity must be wrong, are, IMHO, wrong.
Picking a definition where there doesn’t happen to be land at the discontinuity today is an argument from coincidence. What if an undersea volcano broke the surface at your chosen discontinuity & the US claimed it?
Oh, I was assuming first midnight, not first sunrise. I can’t answer the first sunrise question off the top of my head, but I suspect it’d be somewhere in Florida.
To throw another wrinkle into this, if what you are going to be concerned about is what location actually receives the first sunlight (assuming a clear day), rather than calculated sunrise time, you have to consider local geography, and it will probably be an inland mountain peak. This NY Times page sort of confirms something I’d always heard:
Katahdin is roughly 100 miles west (and some distance north) of Quoddy Head.