Because of how time zones work, the people living just east of the Prime Meridian are "behind" Greenwich time, while those just west are "ahead." But at the Antimeridian, that difference adds up to exactly 12 hours. That means:
But why Greenwich? In the late 1800s, sea travel was booming, but navigation was chaos. Every country used its own "prime meridian" (Paris, Berlin, Washington D.C.—everyone wanted to be the center). Finally, in 1884, 25 nations met in Washington D.C. and voted: Greenwich won. Mostly because the U.S. had already adopted it for its own rail networks, and 72% of the world’s shipping already used it. At the Greenwich observatory, you can literally stand with one foot in the Eastern Hemisphere and one foot in the Western Hemisphere. It is one of the most photographed feet-in-two-places spots on Earth. There is a giant steel line embedded in the courtyard, and a green laser shoots northward into the London sky every night. The Antimeridian: The Land That Time Forgot Now, spin the globe exactly 180 degrees away from Greenwich. You have arrived at the Antimeridian (180° longitude). prime meridian and antimeridian
I am talking, of course, about the and its lesser-known twin, the Antimeridian . Because of how time zones work, the people
They are fictions. But they are useful fictions—the scaffolding that allows a spinning rock to run on a schedule. Every country used its own "prime meridian" (Paris,
We stare at world maps so often that we stop seeing them. The grid of latitude and longitude has become visual white noise—a necessary but boring backdrop to the shapes of continents.