Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 08/26/2010 - 07:22

Hi Bill, Have enjoyed following your posts, a great opportunity for your students and apparently the other classrooms that are following along as well. I like the topic question you left for your last post, and am wondering if you already planned another on time zones (same relationship). I think the concept of time relative to global position has some goodd teaching points as well. Shipboard time, how keeping a uniform time could cause the approaching sunrise/sets to fall at 'odd' times of day, and on a kind of related note, how length of days change in the Arctic as compared to say Colorado, now that we have passed the Autumnal Equinox and days are getting shorter. I have two specific questions to your trip though, and appologise if I missed the first one on an early post. How was shipboard time determined for the Healy? Is it set to Dutch Harbor, Coast Guard HQ, or some other standard? Also, did the Healy and Louis 'syncronize their watches' so to speak, or did you have to switch to a different tz for your visit?

All the best for the rest of your trip, congrats on the lifers. DaveABirding

Bill Schmoker

Hi Dave- great to hear from you. Hope all is well back in Colorado!!The time thing has been really confusing. First, I went "back" two time zones when I flew to Alaska. That is already kind of strange, as most of the mainland there is far enough west to warrant another time zone past that. Dutch Harbor stays on mainland Alaska time even though they are far enough out to be in yet another time zone (my understanding is that they do switch on the next big Aleutian Island west of Unalaska were Dutch Harbor is.) So while my clock was two hours earlier than Colorado the sun seemed about 4 hours off, even before taking the long summer days into consideration.
The Healy sailed from Dutch Harbor on AK time and stayed there until we met the Canadian Coast Guard Cutter Louis S. St. Laurent. Then we changed to Pacific time, which is the time zone of their home port of Kugluktuk. That has been the ship time for the rest of the cruise so far. I'd guess we'll go back to AK time when we part ways. Not surprisingly we use a 24-hour clock on board (so 3 pm is 15:00, for example.)
Since all of the time zone changes and daylight savings time issues can be confusing, the ship's science instruments and data loggers ignore it all and only record in Universal Time (aka Zulu or Greenwich Mean Time.) For example, my watch says it's 13:49 but the sonar and GPS data screens in front of me right now say 20:49.

Anonymous

Good stuff, thanks for the clarification. Keep up the informative posts, BTW hundred degree highs back in CO today.