{Quick lunchtime copy/paste from an email – be back later}
This thread is about 2 topics seen in other threads yesterday.
In one dsharrow was answering questions about Alaskan time zones. While in yet another thread dsharrow and Morgan were exchanging comments about how far south Morgan lives
Don’t mean to pick on you, dsharrow, but you are MUCH further north than Morgan is south! I couldn’t help laughing that most of Morgan’s nearest southern neighbors are probably whales and penguins but Antarctica is a long way south from her. Also, given Alaska’s population density your neighbors to the north would probably be mostly polar bears, moose and caribou with a light sprinkling of people among the wildlife.
It also struck me as funny that she alluded to “being in your future” when parts of Alaska actually DO share a longitude marker with New Zealand (NZ). Anyway, I thought these posts about north and south extremes were so interesting I did a little research last night and came back with a data table for anyone else who might be interested…
NZ actually lies on the same longitude as the westernmost Aleutian Island in Alaska. So western Alaska should be in the same time zone as NZ, however, the US lobbied to have all US territories kept in the same date zone. Thus, several strange doglegs deviate from latitude 180 which (usually) marks the international dateline. Alaska’s very large deviation for The Aleutians is just the most northern one.
Also note that the most northern and southern latitudes for NZ would be approximately equivalent to from Los Angeles to Portland. NZ latitudes do not go anywhere near as far south as Alaska goes north. If a globe will help anyone put these data points in perspective (or if you want to check my accuracy) the website I used to get latitudes and longitudes is:
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/ ... r/map.aspx
.
New Zealand, (South Island)
LAT LONG LOCATION
46S 168E Invercargill (most southern point on South Island)
42S 172E Christchurch
New Zealand, (North Island)
LAT LONG LOCATION
41S 175E Wellington
36S 174E Whangarei (most northern point on North Island)
USA (Alaska)
LAT LONG LOCATION
61N 150W Anchorage (on southern Alaska coast)
58N 134W Juneau (on southern Alaska coast)
53N 173E Aleutian Islands (westernmost point of USA)
USA (Continental)
LAT LONG LOCATION
46N 122W Portland, Oregon
34N 119W Los Angeles, CA
45N 69W Bangor, Maine
35N 77W Greenville, North Carolina
All data points rounded to nearest whole degree