Most time zone maps I look at show a Mercator projection (earth’s surface flattened out), in which the northern and southern extremities are stretched out. These maps don’t make it clear whether or not time zone boundaries are actually drawn all the way to the poles. I realize that because of lack of civilization in the polar regions that there is little practical need tor time zones there, not to mention the fact that day/night cycles are so extreme during the winters and summers that the actual time of day isn’t as significant. Still, if one were to go to either of the poles and walk around it, would you be walking through all of the time zones at once?
Timezones are legal constructs, and so are limited by territory and jurisdiction. As the North Pole is in the middle of the ocean, there isn’t any government with the authority to say what timezone it is in.
I believe, but I have no cite, that in Antartica the convention is to use GMT as the reference time, regardless of where in Antartica you happen to be located. But there’s nothing to stop, say the Australian bases in Antartica from regarding themselves as being in the same timezone as, say, Sydney and Melbourne, if they find that convenient.
Many years ago I drove the ALCAN highway from Anchorage to the lower 48. There was a spot up there that skipped a time zone. So I’m wondering too at the Northern/Southern extremes, how many time zones are there.
Whereabouts? I did not know that.
I don’t recall if it was in Alaska or Canada but here’s a link that apparently shows it.
At one time Alaska was divided between four time zones: the mega-peninsula that constitutes most of the state was in what was then called Alaska-Hawaii Standard Time; the narrow strip and island chain to the southeast in Pacific Standard Time; the Aleutian Peninsula and Islands in what I think was called Aleutian Standard Time; and a 30-mile strip of coast around Yakutat was on Yukon Standard Time.
At some point Alaska rewrote its time zones, and now is in only two – the Aleutian area stayed the same, and the rest of the state went on Yukon ST. Meanwhile the Yukon moved to PST. See this other map at the site aahala linked.
Regarding the OP, the time zones as defined run straight to the Poles – but with only water north of 80 degrees north and only Antarctica (addressed in a previous post) in the south, for all practical purposes the south coasts of any inhabited lands constitute the ends of the time zones.