I saw mention of this today online and thought this was worth talking about.
Most of us are aware of the concept of “leap years” occurring every four years (except years evenly divisible by 100 so long as they are also not divisible by 400). Leap years have a leap day that ends up creating a day marked as February 29th. We’re also familiar with daylight saving where we lose and gain an hour during the year.
To a lesser extent, people may know about “leap seconds” being added to them end of a June 30th and December 31st year to keep alignment between UTC and mean solar time.
However, it’s quite rare that we hear or know of an entire day disappearing from the calendar.
Well, as December 29th (Thursday) draws to a close for Samoa it’ll skip forward to 31st December (Saturday) effectively suppressing December 30th from ever existing in Samoa. The last time Samoa changed its position in relation to the international dateline was all the way back in 1892 to improve trade with the USA. This time around, the change is supported by perceived benefits in trade with Australia and New Zealand.
Who knew that there was so much more to time?
Follow Us!