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It’s been one year since we started this show!
Of course, this last week alone has felt like a year…
Our very first episode was about people who were helping each other out in the midst of a big disaster.
So not much has changed.
But then, time is an odd thing.
A single afternoon can feel like it’s dragging on forever, while a year can go by and you can wonder where the heck it went!
But there are places on Earth where time is at its weirdest: the North and South Poles.
Time zones, of course, are mostly based on lines of latitude, which run from north to south.
Lines of latitude converge when they go as far north or as far south as they can go.
In Antarctica, the research stations various countries use tend to set time zones that are in sync with a time zone in the home country.
It only makes sense that an American base, for example, would want to work and live on US time.
But at the North Pole, where there’s no land and no permanent population, anybody that happens to be in the area can work on whatever time zone they want.
And the movement of the sun is no help here, because at the poles, a single day as we typically measure it lasts a year.
At the North Pole, sunrise is around the spring equinox, and noon is the summer solstice.
The fall equinox is sunset, and midnight is the winter solstice.
The South Pole has the opposite.
So, to recap, time is weird enough to live through at the usual latitudes.
But at the poles?
It’s really weird.
It was on this day in 1874 that the poem “Home on the Range” was published in a Kansas newspaper, which was one of the earliest to spread the words to a now iconic song.
So maybe it’s time to get yourself out to where the buffalo roam, or at least to the World’s Largest Buffalo Monument.
That’s in Jamestown, North Dakota.
It’s 26 feet tall and weighs 60 tons, and answers to the name Dakota Thunder.
Figuratively speaking – it would be terrifying if it really did talk back to us.
Time Has No Meaning at the North Pole(Scientific American)
