Watch: Earth spins through a full year in this time-lapse video.Find out what the time difference is between UTC and your time zone, using this chart from the National Hurricane Center.Army, which divides up the Earth into time zones named after letters of the alphabet, refers to UTC as Zulu time, since it falls in the Z time zone, and Zulu is the code word for that letter in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet. The acronym came about as a compromise between English and French speakers: Coordinated Universal Time would normally be abbreviated as CUT, and the French name, Temps Universel Coordonné, would be TUC. This means that no country or territory officially uses UTC as a local time. UTC is not a time zone, but a time standard that is the basis for civil time and time zones worldwide. The time can be displayed using both the 24-hour format (0 - 24) or the 12-hour format (1 - 12 am/pm). You might be wondering why UTC is the abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time. GMT is a time zone officially used in some European and African countries. UTC incorporates measurements of the Earth's rotation as well as averaged readings from around 400 atomic clocks around the world, according to the website. In 1967, a committee at the United Nations officially adopted UTC as a standard that's more accurate than GMT for setting clocks. Earthquakes, melting ice sheets and natural oscillations in our planet's motion can cause changes of a few fractions of a second in the amount of time it takes the Earth to spin on its axis, according to NASA. The time standard against which clocks were set then became known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).īut by the middle of the 20th century, the new technology of the atomic clock, which can measure time with incredible accuracy, was showing that the Earth's rotation actually varied slightly from day to day. At the conference, 41 delegates from 25 countries chose to set the prime meridian - the zero point for longitude lines - as passing through Greenwich, England, according to. But there was no universally agreed-upon equivalent for lines of longitude, which run north to south. Lines of latitude, which run east to west around our planet, had always been measured from the equator. In 1884, members met at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss a way to synchronize clocks around the globe.
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